For What It's Worth
by chrissie0707
Summary: Set in Nova42's Providence universe. Dean thinks he's done and Sam knows that. He knows his big brother thinks he doesn't have a damn thing left in him that can continue on or is even worth fighting for but he's WRONG. Language, violence, OCs, future events, and angst as far as the eye can see. FINAL CHAPTER POSTED.
1. Part I

_Author Notes: It's entirely possible that not everyone who clicked the link understands what I'm talking about when I say "Providence universe." So first, a quick word from our sponsors...(which I was expressly ordered not to edit)..._

Y'all might be able to tell from the words sprawled haphazardly across your screen like the corpses of a hostage situation gone terribly wrong, I am not Chrissie0707. I am the one Chrissie0707 has often referred to Ncakes, prompt machine, and I think she once called me slightly odd and kind of mean. However in my tiny little corner of FFnet I go by Nova42.

Y'all might be wondering why I've gathered you here today. So Chrissie0707 wrote this awesome story based off two scenes in a story I wrote called Providence. One scene is in chapter 17, the other in chapter 18. You don't have to read Providence to enjoy this beautifully written story, but you're probably not gonna really understand what the hell is going on.

So for those of you who don't wanna read Providence the quick and dirty of it is, in the future the world goes to hell. In 2019 Dean gets sent back in time, then stuff happens. Chrissie's story takes place in the world that's gone to hell, before Dean goes back in time. If you are confused about anything at all or have questions about what is happening in the story please feel free to send me (Nova42) a pm. Chrissie has done an exceptional job out laying out a world that until a month or so ago resided solely in my head. I hope y'all enjoy.

 _Okay, me again. She crazy. I'm not sure that I can honestly remember the circumstances that led to me writing this. If I were to take a guess, I was probably being a "brat" or lost some sort of bet that ended with me owing Nova words. (It happens...sort of a lot.) I do remember eventually being told, "I think I want you to write something from Providence." A scene, in particular. Let me reiterate: one single, specific scene. And I thought, that's incredibly humbling, and AWESOME, and sounds fun, and will be a nice 3-5k story with which to honor a really spectacular bit of fiction._

 _But in reality, it will be posted in five parts, because I completely underestimated just how moved I've been, or how inspired I'd be, by this friend of mine and this story of hers._

 _This is a companion piece, and an anniversary tribute story. But above all else, it's a fanfic written for and inspired by my favorite fanfic, and a truly talented writer/world creator._

 _EDIT 6/13/16: Edited and reposted to match the tense of the rest of the Providence universe._

* * *

 **For What It's Worth**

 _Part I_

* * *

 _Paranoia strikes deep_

 _Into your life it will creep_

 _It starts when you're always afraid_

 _You step out of line, the man come and take you away_

* * *

A lot of the specifics of that day would grow fuzzier as the hours stacked up, but not the muzzle flash. That was gonna stay with Dean for a while. He'd see it every time he chanced closing his eyes for days afterward.

The colors would fade by shades behind his lowered eyelids, the harsh white retinal echo of _right the hell after_ giving way to a yellowish tint of sun-stained paper, and finally the subtle teal bloom of the ocean off the Hawaiian coast. How it looked in pictures, at least.

Or, how it USED to look. Before the Darkness.

* * *

 _February 5, 2018_

 _He couldn't see them but he could hear them, shifting in the dark just out of the reach of his straining gaze. He knew them well enough now to sense the intent of their next act, and it slithered across his consciousness before they even had the chance to make it. A soul-chilling cold brushed across his bruised chest, stopping short and granting him a moment's surge of misguided hope before slicing deep into the exposed space between his broken ribs._

 _He tried to scream but it ended up caught in his throat, leaving him choking and gasping as the frigid blast became an intense and unbearable pain, ruthlessly hot and searing, and he was given no warning as they –_

Dean woke with a start, a silent scream frozen on his lips and his heart thudding impossibly fast and utterly painful against his sternum. The memories of injuries long-since healed whispered throughout his body and taunted his senses, phantom aches and tears and breaks all vying for his attention. He forced each and every one of them to the side for the moment and focused on calming himself down, on simply drawing in a neat succession of loud, harsh, chest rattling breaths.

It should have been easy; just one breath at a time, in and out. In and out. And slowly, so he didn't suffocate himself.

Once he'd found a steady rhythm and the spots dissipated, Dean lie still and moved swiftly to the next item on the list as it came roaring mercilessly back to the forefront: _pain_. He attempted to compartmentalize each agonizing stab that he knew wasn't real and, annoyed by yet another sense of lingering, stubborn weakness, told himself to _stop_ this nonsense and get his shit together. Pins and needles tingled in his right hand where it was twisted tightly, fisting the blanket bunched against his bare chest.

He'd given up on sleepwear early on in the healing process, finding even the softest of tees or loosest of sweats still restricted his movements and breathing, bringing him to consciousness more than once on the brink of a panic attack from the physical sensation alone. Like he was being choked, asphyxiated. He'd found a way to sidestep that particular feeling, but there didn't seem to be any way to shake the nightmares, and he'd startled awake the same way every morning for the better part of two months, ever since he'd first woken after having been brought back there. The horrific recurring dream – not one derived from imagination or even fear, but from deeply ingrained _memory_ – always cut away at the same moment, but the torture continued longer. When it happened, when _they_ had him…there was no relief in sight. Not just then, not for days.

With his breathing holding steady and his heart still pounding, but doing so at something at least resembling a normal pace, Dean dragged his legs from under his covers and hit the light on his bedside table. He had no way to be sure it was morning until he threw a squinted glance at his watch. He was long used to the dark, windowless rooms and corridors in the bunker, and with the sheer volume of hours he'd been sleeping since being rescued from the clutches of the Hollow Men, since being cooped up within the confines of those slabs of concrete, the time of day hadn't actually mattered much.

But that was all going to change.

Dean bent gingerly and groped on the floor until his searching fingers landed on a pair of discarded, faded jeans. They hung on his hips a bit looser than he'd like, and he had to cinch his belt to the notch he'd gotten used to since coming back gaunt and sick in ways that had resisted angelic intervention.

Unless his father was standing behind him with That Look, Dean had never made a bed in his life before they moved into the bunker. He took the time to do so, tucking in the corners of his blankets so meticulously even Sam would had scoffed. But it had been quite a while since Sammy lost all semblance of control in any given situation he'd been thrust into, and he tried, but he didn't always remember how to appreciate the little things he _could_ control.

Dean dropped next to the bed and went through the motions of push-ups, and crunches after that, earning back muscle and strength, focusing his attention on steady breathing and not on the memories of darkness and agony both threatening and beckoning him from the shaded, wounded corners of his mind.

Sam, who was still always so buttoned-up and proper, still all about routine and order, would have given him hell about working out in jeans for no other reason than he could, but Dean would have to bring such activities outside of these four walls to even give him the opportunity, and he wasn't quite ready for that.

It was disappointing how easily he worked up a sweat since coming back, how quickly he tired, but Dean dug deep and pushed through a string of chin-ups at the bar he'd installed himself, until his arms quaked and refused to hold his weight for another second. His healed but weakened left leg dropped him too easily all the way to the floor, and he stayed there on all fours until he got his breath back. Again.

He washed up in the sink in his room, hadn't taken the short trip down the hall to the showers in weeks. Hadn't seen fit to put the wreck of his skinny, healing body on display for the bunker's other inhabitants. He knew how he was looked at: the weakest among them, more a hindrance than an asset, someone who was holding them back.

Dean leaned on the edges of the narrow porcelain sink, studying his reflection in a mirror that didn't quite fit right in its frame and had been replaced on more than one occasion, each previous occupant cracked and splintered by an angry fist. _His_ angry fist. Yet another reminder of the indiscretions in his past he couldn't escape the memory of. He winced at the smudges of exhaustion under his eyes, a look he couldn't seem to rid himself of no matter how long he slept or how much he ate. He swiped a palm across his chin and knew he was long past due for a shave, but that was a task that begged for clear eyes and steady hands, both of which he'd been lacking for a good long while.

Dean pulled away from the mirror and put the reflection of that exhausted, wounded stranger at his back, crossing the short distance of his room to dress for the day in clothes that no longer felt like his or fit quite right.

In the six years they'd been inhabiting the bunker, Sam had changed rooms at least a dozen times, sometimes for a reason Dean could understand and sometimes for a reason he couldn't seem to ever truly forget, but mostly because he might have been grown up but still couldn't ever seem to _settle_ anywhere. Still couldn't ever be content, always on the move just like Dad was. Dean had kept the same room since day one.

The bunker felt like home once, like the only home Dean had ever really claimed or known, but he had to figure he just wasn't meant to have those sorts of luxuries, because this home of theirs was no longer _theirs_ , but had become a crowded fortress, a temporary sanctuary and base of command.

It felt colder than it used to, back when it was just them, though the changes extended beyond these walls. The bunker was isolated from what remained of the world in every conceivable way, buried away in secret and off of a grid that no longer powered much of anything. They'd been forced to conserve what little energy they managed to draw from a line of antiquated generators humming to life at a set schedule and for a pre-determined amount of time, resulting in long pockets of time in which a chill snaked its way through the halls like a heat-seeking missile with its sights set on Dean and settled deep in his bones.

But the persistent cold that had become a part of him was a result of more than the air temperature of the subterranean structure. Even with the steady, barely audible whisper of the heater running overhead, and even as Dean told himself he was feeling better today than yesterday and twice as good as the day before that, he couldn't suppress the shiver that wracked his weakened body. He conceded to the chill and dragged on another layer, a thick blue-checked flannel with frayed hems over his long-sleeved Henley and t-shirt.

Boots next, laced tightly with stiff, frozen fingers, and then a couple of knives tucked away. Nothing excessive – a pocketknife and short silver blade at his ankle – and more from force of habit than necessity.

Properly armed for his day of wandering about indoors, Dean debated the coffee maker plugged at the end of the desk, one that had been moved to his room from pantry storage when he'd finally been well enough to know he wanted a cup of hot black coffee more than he wanted sex but wasn't quite strong enough to make it to the kitchen of his own accord. After that, it just became easier to stay in his room in the morning – and for the rest of the day – and much to Sam's chagrin and more than one comment of concern, Dean hadn't been much of a fixture in the common areas since he found his feet. He had no desire to make a spectacle out of his return to the job, but wanted to slide back into things unnoticed. About a week earlier, Sam had seen fit to point out that the longer Dean chose to keep to himself, the worse it was going to be when he finally emerged.

He decided on skipping the coffee, a choice he hoped not to come to regret later in the day, and pulled a protein bar from the topmost of the desk drawers and tucked it into the back packet of his jeans. His nosey little brother would encourage him to eat more, but Sam only pretended to know everything he was always talking about.

Sam wasn't the only one with respect for routine and structure. Dean knew what was necessary to get himself back to top form, and that entailed practice, and repetition. And, apparently, heavy amounts of frustration. He lifted his .45 from the desktop, and habit had him checking the clip though he knew how she was loaded. There was no need to conceal a weapon in the halls but he tucked the pistol into the waistband of his jeans all the same, from another deeply ingrained force of habit and an innate desire not to ever advertise his business to anyone. He'd been hitting the range every day, emptying his fair share of clips in the privacy of a locked-down shooting gallery like a lunatic, but something strange, some incredibly _off_ feeling had Dean wanting to search out his brother before anything else.

An influx of revolving strange faces and probing eyes had Dean locking the door to his room after he pulled it closed. A bulb overhead flickered and went out completely with a soft _buzz_ and a subtle _snap_ , plunging a short stretch of the otherwise empty corridor into relative darkness. It was nothing out of the ordinary and had been happening all over the bunker of late, at least once each time he'd ventured out in the still, quiet halls that once carried the whispered echoes of voices long silenced, but were now too often teeming with the types of boisterous characters that populated the barrooms and dives Dean used to seek solace in.

Back when they'd taken that break as the Darkness was just emerging, after Castiel had been cured of Rowena's attack dog curse but took care to beat the tar out of Dean first, it hadn't been more than a few days before the perpetually restless Sam was the first of the three to succumb to an aggressive bout of cabin fever. Full days before Dean soaped up every car in the garage, Sam had organized the card catalog into a brand new system only that only made – and _still_ only made – sense to him, cleaned up what remained of the thrashing the library had taken at the hands of the Stynes, and then had finally gone through the entire structure, updating every lighting fixture with some sort of twisted hippie halogen bulb that was supposed to last around three years.

Three years. Dean guessed that was about right, but it felt more like ten. Like forty.

A pair of unfamiliar former soldier-types dressed in fatigues and sour expressions gave him a wide berth as he passed, pressing their backs to the gray tile of the corridor and pinning their beady, curious eyes on him. They didn't have to know Dean to know _of_ him. One surefire way to make a lasting impression was to be carried, broken and bloody and screaming, through a sea of already terrified trauma survivors in the claustrophobic corridors of this place.

He didn't know if it was his ears or imagination that heard them whispering about him as he moved along, but the fine hairs on his forearms and the back of his neck stood at attention either way.

* * *

Sam's room was unlocked, dark and empty, but tidy. Frustratingly so, in fact. The guy might have been too busy to check up on his bored, bedridden brother first thing, but his schedule wasn't so full as to miss an extended early-morning laundry folding session. Apparently.

Dean chewed his lip, hands braced on either side of the door frame as he stared at the meticulously built tower of stacked button-downs and t-shirts at the end of Sam's bed, thinking real hard about knocking them all into a messy pile on the floor. Decided against it, because he was on a mission that was going to put himself in a very specific doghouse with his brother, and he knew better than to poke the bear with a stick when he was already planning on poking it with a grenade launcher.

He shoved off of the frame, drawing back into the hallway, and set a course to find Sam. Or as a last resort, maybe a volleyball to talk to. But the farther along the halls Dean traveled, the more he found himself wanting to turn right the hell around, just pull an about-face to make John Winchester proud and high-tail it out of there. Every instinctual, rode-hard and road-tested nerve ending in his body wanted him to spin on his heel and walk the well-worn path back to the safe, familiar confines of his room. Play some good music and pretend he'd never had such an asinine idea.

Instead, Dean cracked his neck, straightened his spine and executed a stubborn internal course-correction, following the lazy ess-curve at the end of the hallway that would lead him to those common areas he'd been so actively avoiding of late.

Areas he'd been avoiding because Sam had been occupied, and needed, but Dean wasn't, and something about that had burrowed under his skin and set up shop, irritating him like an itch he couldn't scratch away. He might not have been the same as he used to be, might not have been one hundred percent, but he was still a big brother, and still a Winchester and a…a friggin' legacy or some shit, and that should have meant something. In the bunker, if anywhere. Should at least have earned him a front row seat instead of all this talk and business of being sidelined or bedridden or what the hell have you.

 _You did it to yourself,_ Sam reprimanded Dean in his mind as he stepped past a pallet of shrink-wrapped boxes, evidence of a recent supply drop he hadn't even been aware of taking place. _No one's locking those doors but you._

Dean rolled his eyes, because even in his own head the son of a bitch just _had_ to be right. _Shut up, Sammy_. He stopped, backtracked a step and frowned at the boxes, unlabeled but presumably row upon row of canned foods lifted from long-abandoned warehouse storage. They didn't get a lot of fresh food these days.

Dean had maybe been out of the game for a couple weeks – _give or take –_ but he couldn't shake the nagging feeling in his gut that supply drop plus missing Sam had to mean the drop team had brought something extra, and probably important, along from Magnus's safe house. He picked up the pace, forgoing all previous thoughts and plans involving the shooting gallery and his routine morning target practice.

Another bulb flickered overhead as he passed the infirmary, drawing his gaze momentarily upward and he almost ran smack into Castiel, who even after their near-collision didn't immediately seem to notice Dean standing in front of him, wavering strangely and uncharacteristically on his feet.

He grabbed Cas by the upper arms and steadied the angel, which was really saying something, seeing as Dean was relatively newly mobile and Cas was, well, a frickin' _angel_. But the pearly gates were closed for business, and something about constantly mending breaches and breaks in the flesh and bone of his friends without the benefit of a heavenly recharge had outfitted Cas with an aged, weary look an angel shouldn't be saddled with. It was visibly weighing on and wearing him down, lines and shadows marring his features and growing more pronounced because he was perpetually the healer and never the healed, voluntarily extending his grace as close to its limits as any of them dared to push. But such a thing could only be stretched so far, as they'd seen on more than one occasion over the years, and Cas had been putting so much of what he had into healing everyone else that he didn't have the juice left over to properly maintain his vessel. He was keeping them alive, the ones that had the chance and opportunity to make it back to the bunker and _be_ kept alive, but at what cost? As far as any of them knew, the only angels left were both residing in the bunker.

Castiel's eyes widened. "Dean," he said finally, by way of greeting or maybe just finally noting his presence. Could have honestly gone either way, since Dean wasn't sure how long it had been since he last crossed paths with his winged pal. If memory served – and memory had been a bit preoccupied of late – it may very well not have been since the shattered bones in his leg were finally well and restored to all the proper places. "I didn't see you…there."

Dean wrinkled his nose as a flare of phantom pain erupted deep in his shin from the mere thought of the horrific injury, and his fingers twitched to probe the long-healed spot. "Yeah, figured as much." He hardly recognized his own voice, a rarely used low, rough sound that felt as though it was being torn from his throat.

Castiel finally shook Dean's hand from his arm, stepping back and composing himself. He adjusted the wrinkled lapels of his coat, but that didn't do much for the exhausted look about him. "A group arrived from the safe house late last night with supplies but there were…complications, on their journey. And a few wounded."

It wasn't a taunt, nor was it meant to guilt him, but Dean winced, hearing both. Hearing, _you weren't there_. Hearing, _they could have used you._ "I heard," he said lamely. Their outfit was weakening by the day, emotionally, physically, and in number. All the more reason for Dean to make his way beyond their underground walls.

"It's taking more out of me than I'd anticipated." Clearly, or Cas wouldn't have been making such an admission. He caught himself, looking uncomfortable, and made a general gesture down the hallway behind Dean. "I have to go now. I'm needed."

"Cas, wait," Dean said, stepping to the side and planting himself firmly in the angel's path. "How you doin'? Really?"

Castiel shook off the concern without pause. "I'm fine, Dean." His eyes narrowed. "You're the one who is supposed to be healing."

"I've healed," Dean said, so quickly even _he_ could hear how forced and false it was. How desperate. "I'm great."

Cas cocked his head. "You're limping."

Dean shifted his weight to his strong leg, stood tall and crossed his arms. "No, I'm not."

Castiel sighed, seemingly lacking the strength to go toe-to-toe in a stubborn-off with a Winchester. "The human body is a fragile instrument, Dean," he went ahead and tried anyway. "As is the soul. I was able to mend the breaks in your bones, but your suffering and injury cut far deeper than that."

Dean tilted his head back, momentarily hoping for one of these flickering light panels to swing free and knock the angel in the side of the head. "I'm _fine_ ," he reiterated. "What's going on? I can't find Sam, and you said you're needed? For what? That team bring along a special gift with purchase or something?"

Another sigh, the exasperated, put-upon one that Dean was long-used to drawing out of people, parent, brother and friend alike. From Cas, though, it most likely meant the reference simply went over his head. "Yes," he said simply.

Dean raised his eyebrows. "Then why don't I know about it?"

"What part of 'you're supposed to be healing' is proving too difficult for you to grasp?"

Sometimes, Dean thought he preferred Original Recipe Castiel over this unpredictably sarcastic and occasionally dickish one. "Just…shut up and tell me what's going on, Cas."

The angel's eyes narrowed. "You are aware that those are mutually exclusive actions?"

Dean's chin dropped as he glared and crossed his arms.

"Sam needs me to translate something the team brought with them last night," Cas conceded, voice rough and low and wrecked. "Something they happened upon in Magnus's stores. It could prove useful in our fight, but part of it's in Enochian."

"I'll do it," Dean volunteered quickly. Too quickly. Too eagerly. That touch of desperation leaching in unpermitted once more. He held up his hands as the angel lifted his chin, instantly and rightly suspicious. "I get it, okay? I'm healing. And I'm not gonna strain anything reading a few words, promise. Besides, isn't this why you downloaded an entire language into my brain? So there would be someone else to translate this kinda stuff?"

"No," Cas replied, leveling his own glare, one that might have proven lethal if he hadn't been trembling where he stood. "I downloaded an entire language into your brain because you were annoying me that day."

 _Huh. Looks like Sammy owes me five bucks._ They hadn't been sure Cas was capable of something as human as being annoyed, and even less so capable of admitting to it. "Fair enough." Dean clapped Castiel hard on the shoulder, sending the angel staggering a few steps and proving his point. "You go get some rest, and I'm gonna see if I can't make my genius little brother feel like an idiot in front of a roomful of people."

* * *

The bunker was built by the Men of Letters to be a command center for any one of a myriad of supernaturally-induced worst case scenarios. Warded, hidden from even the likes of the Hollow Men and made to withstand just about anything short of the actual end of days, but even so it didn't quite have the designated spaces that Sam would have preferred when it officially became their base of operations, the giant nerd taking his cue from one of those online games he used to pretend he didn't play during sparse pockets of downtime. The conference table and corresponding room were incredibly well-equipped and maintained considering the era they come from, but they were also in a common area too big and open for quiet, serious meetings. As often as sensitive information passes by their eyes or ears, they'd both desired something a little more private when it came time to deciphering codes or translating texts. Mounting attacks. Assessing acceptable collateral damage.

The dark thought released a snaking chill down the length of Dean's spine, one not dissimilar to the frigid, internal warning flare inexplicably sent up when the Hollow Men were close by. There were days the world felt too eerily parallel to an apocalyptic future only he had seen, a future he'd fought to escape. All too often he found himself going through the motions of thoughts, plans, and actions similar to those he'd sought so desperately to avoid. Thought he _had_ avoided _._

But here they were, both older and markedly changed by what they'd seen and survived, but where Sam appeared mature and strong, Dean looked, and _felt_ , tired and done. Not Sam. In fact, Dean could almost pinpoint the exact day he last saw his brother slip and seem vulnerable. It was years ago, when they came out of the cage, out of Hell, Round Two for both of them.

Sam had strength and resolve coming out of his ass these days, and Dean had been left with nothing but some clinging remnant of inherited stubborn will. He'd been tired and done over and again throughout the years, but never more so than when the Hollow Menhad him for those five days and the slow, agonizing process of healing that followed. And that, really, was saying something.

Sam moved confidently through the world, even when the world was THIS world. He took no prisoners, not with his actions nor with his demeanor, and he never had. Dean was weighed down by the world, held prisoner to it and those around him. It was always something different, but it somehow always felt the same.

" _I'm tired, Sam. I'm tired of this job, this life…this weight on my shoulders, man. I'm tired of it."_

" _You don't think I've given enough? You don't think I've paid enough? I'm done with it. All of it."_

" _I guess I'm a little numb to the earth-shattering revelations at this point."_

" _I've seen a lot of hunters live and die. You're starting to talk like one of the dead ones, Dean."_

" _No, I'm talking the way a person talks when they've had it, when they can't figure out why they used to think all this matters."_

" _You were right, okay? I see light at the end of the tunnel. And I'm sorry you don't – I am. But it's there. And if you come with me, I can take you to it."_

" _Brother, I'm done."_

Hope had never ridden sidecar with Dean. Sometimes the only thing that got him from one day to the next had been a stubbornly clinging sense of faith in his little brother. But even then, that faith had never really been full nor unwavering, because he'd always had his guard up, because he didn't want to be caught with his pants down whenever Sam decided to leave.

Dean hated himself for that, but he was used to the feeling.

What Dean didn't want to grow used to was the worthless, sidelined feeling that was dragging his mind down dark pathways of memory and regret he'd rather not explore too deeply, at least not without putting a decent dent in a fifth of Jack to put a matching dent in the pain that was being dredged up. But the Jack was running dry, and he needed Sammy to open the door for him, to let him back in the fight. He NEEDED it.

 _Do it right, with a smile. Or don't do it._ Dean forced a casual smirk to his thin, lightly bearded face and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans, tugging them down on his hips. He leaned in the doorway of the meeting room Sam had made, where he'd cleared out some metal shelving and shoved two work desks back-to-back in the middle of what had been a decent-sized but still vaguely claustrophobic-feeling storage closet.

On the makeshift table, a large leather-bound notebook was laid out beneath an ornate lamp, and a few loose pages that had come free of the binding were lined up like a buffet spread. Arms straight and braced on splayed palms framing the notebook, Sam looked drawn and pale, like he'd been up all night, and was staring helplessly at the fragile, ancient, Enochian _-_ ladenpapers. The others were leaning just as stiffly against the edges of the desks, appearing to have pulled the same long shift as Sam.

Hours of work had been done, by all the usual key players, while Dean had been _sleeping_. Or, doing whatever passed for sleep during those unbearably long post-captivity nights.

Colin, rivaling Sam in height and graying temples, and black ops in the old world, had been an integral part of the team since almost the beginning. He was military, and therefore prone to the assumption that he should be in some position of command, and he'd almost too eagerly slid into the spot at Sam's side that Dean had unwillingly and, more importantly, _temporarily_ vacated.

Jackson was in his mid-twenties, probably, and a fellow hunter who'd been with the crew about six months, alternately ferrying post-quarantine survivors and supplies back and forth between the bunker and the safe house they'd established at Magnus's magically concealed compound. Dean didn't even know if Jackson was the kid's first or last name, it was just how he'd first identified himself. He was tough, and he was eager, and he hadn't quite had all of the fight and grit kicked out of him yet. He was sporting a bruise that covered about a quarter of his face, evidence of the kind of trouble that had required Cas's assistance in the infirmary.

Dean cleared his throat, drawing the attention of the three men in the room. Oddly enough, only Sam seemed surprised to see him. "A little – or, man-sized – birdie told me you fellas could use a translator," he said.

Colin lifted his chin in greeting and Jackson grinned, uncrossing his arms and stepping forward to shake Dean's hand. Sam stayed where he was, simply rotated his neck to give his brother a strange, possibly aggravated look; Dean knew his brother pretty well but he was a bit out of practice in translating those looks of his, especially when they crossed his features at warp-speed. "I sent for Cas."

"Yeah, well, turns out Cas is feeling a bit under the weather, so I tagged in for this round." Dean stepped fully into the room, feeling unusually aware of exactly how close the four walls were, how dark the corners seemed. He tried to loosen his movements, but every limb felt stiff and sluggish. "Whatcha got?"

Sam pushed off of the tabletop, drawing himself to his full, considerable height, and crossed his arms over his chest. "I sent for Cas," he stubbornly repeated.

 _Heard you the first time, dude._ Dean narrowed his eyes at his brother, wishing he could feel a fraction as strong as Sam always seemed to. "Well, you get me instead. So show me what you got."

* * *

 _To be continued..._


	2. Part II

**For What It's Worth**

 _Part II_

* * *

Sam sighed and rolled his eyes, but eventually nodded. He turned back to the pages on the table, tapping a few with his fingertips. "Jackson and his guys brought this back with the latest round of supplies last night. It's something they found at Magnus's." He trailed his index finger along a section of tightly scrawled script, not really touching the paper, not risking smearing the ink. _Nerd._ "This part we get. It details a cache of supernatural weapons he'd hidden somewhere here in the bunker."

"In _this_ bunker?" Dean clarified incredulously.

"Yeah."

"Sam, we've been through every square inch of this place."

"Apparently not."

Dean scoffed and moved closer to the table. He shook his head. "So Magnus did something shady and hid a bunch of crap from the rest of the Men of Letters? Catch me, Sammy, I might faint from shock."

Sam frowned. "Yeah. Well, as long as the pompous son of a bitch wasn't just patting himself on the back, we're looking at the possibility of some serious firepower he scrounged up and squirreled away."

"How serious we talkin'?"

Colin leaned in, threw his weight around just in case Dean had managed to forget he was there over the course of the last few minutes. "This could finally be the upper hand we need."

Jackson, for what it's worth, stuck to the perimeter of the conversation.

Dean raised his eyebrows, waited for Sam to nod his agreement before continuing. "Great. So were you guys debating hairstyles or something? What the hell are we doing standin' around talking about this? Let's find these weapons."

"Yeah, well, that's easier said than done." Sam exhaled, a long breath teeming with tangible impatience and frustration. "In these notes, Magnus mentions a spell that's needed to locate the room, _and_ to gain access once it's found." He turned his attention back to the notebook, spinning it on the table so Dean could easier see the pages. "It's this bit in the margins we're held up on. I'm guessing it's more details about the spell."

Dean squinted, leaned over to get a better look at the passage in question. His weak leg protested the angle, and he gritted his teeth behind pursed lips, taking a moment to compartmentalize the stab of pain that was suddenly radiating through the entire left side of his body.

"It's in Enochian."

Dean raised his eyes to his brother. "Yeah, thanks, Sam. I can see that."

Behind him, Jackson chuckled, and Sam gave Dean a look that let him know he wasn't in the mood for games and even less so for a bout of smartassery, and if they weren't in a room full of people Sam might have hauled his weak ass up against a wall or otherwise gotten in his face by that point.

"What's it say?" Sam seethed through clenched teeth. "Is it relevant to the spell or the weapons?"

Dean scanned the scrawls, translating bits and pieces easily enough but still needing a moment for his tired eyes to adjust and his sore body to loosen up. He couldn't discreetly reach down and knead the muscles in his leg, so he took a few slow breaths and willed them to relax so that the entire limb didn't lock up on him when he attempted to straighten. It wouldn't go far in making his case if he fell on his face trying to walk out of the room. "Both, I think."

"You think?"

Colin raised his eyebrows. "Sam, you want me to get Castiel? Or…" He blanked on the name, waved a careless hand in the air. "The other one."

Dean shifted his eyes to his brother – _seriously, dude? –_ and then leveled a glare at Colin, not giving a shit about the man's size or military training. He'd mop the floor with the guy if he kept on that way, bum leg or not.

"Dean?" Sam prodded from the other side of the table, doing the valiant thing and giving his brother another shot before he made that call for someone with wings and a fluency in Enochian that wasn't secondhand and born from irritation.

Dean forced his gaze back down at the notebook to double-check the translation, and despite his assurances to Cas, it _was_ proving to be a bit straining. "It's not the spell, but it might be the place to find it. An old Men of Letters chapter house," he said, squinting at chicken scratches that would be a rough read even in English. "In…Upland, Indiana."

Colin took that as his cue, immediately moving to rustle together a handful of maps and atlases from a shelf and slapping them onto the table next to the notes.

Sam leaned over Dean's shoulder like he was checking his homework, like he stood a chance in hell of seeing what Dean saw in the Enochian writing. "A chapter house? Like that one before in St. Louis?"

"I don't know, Sam. You seein' a picture or something here that I don't?" Dean resisted the overwhelming urge to elbow his brother out of his personal space, sidestepped out from under him instead and waved a hand at the notebook once he wasn't feeling quite so cornered. "I got spell, chapter house, and Upland, Indiana."

"Address?"

Dean nodded. "Yeah."

"Anything useful about the specifics of the spell?" Jackson finally spoke up.

Dean liked the guy, he did, and the kid was clearly shouldering a bit of responsibility over this one, finding the notebook and organizing the hasty supply run back to the bunker that ended with a few of his guys laid up in the infirmary. He was looking for some immediate gratification with regards to the information, but it didn't look like Dean could put the young hunter's mind any more at ease than he could his own.

"Sorry," Dean said, shaking his head. "Magnus wasn't exactly the type to make it that easy."

"No," Sam scoffed. "He was the type to put a world-saving weapons cache in one place, the spell to get to them in another, and the location of the damn spell somewhere else entirely."

"Son of a bitch," Jackson deadpanned.

"You're not wrong," Dean agreed, tilting his head. Those pesky muscles in his leg screamed out once more for attention, and he shuffled slowly away from the table until he could lean back against the wall, further from prying eyes and the harsh, exposing light at the center of the room.

"Okay," Colin piped up from where he was bent over the maps, in a loud, harsh tone meant to shush them, meant to command their attention because it was the only thing he _could_ command. "Upland's looking to be a twelve-hour drive, assuming we don't run into trouble."

"And how often does that happen?" Dean commented coolly, without requesting permission to speak from his wannabe C.O.

Sam thought on it a moment, gnawing his lower lip and somehow appearing to Dean simultaneously as the leader he'd become and the boy he barely ever was. "We've lost enough as it is, and we can't afford to put this off. We move out tonight. As soon as we're ready."

Dean clapped his hands together. "All right, sounds good. Let's go."

Sam and Colin exchanged the sort of look over the table that was liable to get the both of them smacked, and Sam tapped his fingertips on the tabletop as he squared his shoulders once more over the notes in question. "Hey, guys, could you give me and my brother a minute here?"

"Sure thing," Jackson said, nodding at them with a genuine smile as he headed out of the room.

"You bet." There was something dark and feral buried none-too-deeply beneath Colin's perpetually cool and cocky exterior, something that once more set the hair on the back of Dean's neck at attention. They sized each other up as he passed on his way to the door, two alpha dogs in the yard. Colin raised his eyebrows on the threshold, the expression looking like a dare or a threat, or maybe both.

As soon as the others were out of sight but not necessarily out of earshot, Dean rounded on his little brother. "I don't like that guy."

Sam frowned but doesn't raise his eyes from Magnus's notebook, probably dwelling on the fact his giant nerd brain couldn't crack the code like Dean so effortlessly could. "Who, Colin?" He tilted his head, mouth dropping open as he tried another angle on the pages. "You like him just fine, Dean."

Dean snorted. "Yeah, well, that was before I went down for a few days and that son of a bitch decided I needed to be replaced and that he was the one to do it."

Sam's eyes whipped up. "A few – " He sighed, shaking his head. "I don't think that's what's going on."

"Then what?"

"Dean, you…" Sam took a breath, made sure he had all the words in a tidy line before pressing on and saying them aloud. "When you were captured – "

Dean shoved down the wince that threatened to crawl from his gut and climb his spine, plastered on a blank, emotionless expression. _Captured. Sure, we'll call it that._

" – the three guys that were with you? They didn't make it."

Dean swallowed a lump suddenly lodged in his throat, one that tasted stale and sour and a lot like guilt. Considering what _he_ went through, the fate of the others had seemed fairly obvious. He hadn't asked about them, hadn't wanted to. But that didn't mean he'd forgotten their names or faces – he never would – but had stupidly thought maybe if he never voiced it out loud, he could pretend for as long as possible that he wasn't directly responsible for the deaths of three more people. He cleared his throat, reached up to knead the back of his neck. "Yeah, I figured that. I guess I just – "

"They weren't just killed, Dean." Sam fully abandoned the book on the table. His gaze darted away from Dean before he dragged his eyes back. "They were ripped apart. For fun. And they were his friends. He's just…suspicious, man. He doesn't understand why, out of all the people the Hollow Men have killed, you were…left alive."

Dean folded his arms across his chest. Alive. Yeah, that's about all he was, and _barely_ that, when they were done with him. When they'd grown bored, when they'd had their fill of the sounds they could rip out of him. When they left him in that freezing, decaying building, hanging at the mercy of numb fingers and raw wrists, broken and bleeding with nothing left to cling to but the hope that any of the operations randomly shutting down inside his body would finally kill him and grant him a release.

But he hadn't died, and Sam and a team of blurry, faceless blobs had found what was left of him by sheer luck. Whether that was good or bad was yet to be seen. Dean couldn't figure that he was really doing much more than simply surviving. Not yet.

"Well," Dean began, his voice low and rough and escaping him seemingly of its own accord, pulling his mind from those dark, endless alleyways he was likely not to come back from one of these days. "I could tell him if you like." He forced a tight smile, hitched a shoulder. "Or, hey, maybe you could. He seems to like you well enough. Hell, you guys could – "

"Shut up, Dean." A weighted sigh rolled past Sam's lips. "Just…don't be a dick, okay? Cut him some slack."

Dean's eyes widened. "Cut _him_ some – " He let out an insincere bark of laughter. "So now I gotta apologize for not being dead?"

"What? No, of course you don't _ever_ need to…" Sam paused, raised his hands. "We're getting off-topic here."

 _Yeah, I should say so._ Dean dragged a hand down his face, rubbed at his chin. He took a moment to decide on the best approach, figured that Sam was his little brother before and above anything else, and that usually meant honestly was the best play. "I gotta get out of here, Sammy."

Sam wasn't dumb, or naïve. "Out on this mission, you mean?"

"Yeah." Dean narrowed his eyes at his brother, not necessarily appreciating the incredulousness in Sam's tone. "Yeah, that's what I mean."

Sam shook his head. "Dean – "

"Just – hear me out." Dean tapped the air with his fingertips then took a deep breath. "I'm goin' nuts, man. I can't take it anymore. I hate the way everyone looks at me around here."

Sam, unimpressed, arched a brow. "Dean, that's because the last time most people here saw you, it was either when we found you in that building or when you were brought back here covered in blood and half – " he broke off, bailing out the both of them. He pointed his eyes at the ceiling, rolled them down and fixed his gaze on the hard, grey cement floor. He sucked in a harsh breath, released it slowly. "What do you expect, Dean? It's been damn near two months since anyone has seen you up and around."

"Well, it's barely been a month since I could – " Dean pulled up short, but it was too late. The damage had been done.

Sam rocked back on his heels, the slightest hint of a smirk settling on his face, something akin to a dare to finish the sentence, as Dean almost made his brother's point for him.

Dean wisely chose not to take the bait, instead squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. "Well, I'm fine now. I can do this mission."

In true Sam Winchester fashion, his brother bypassed the fact that they didn't even truly know what all said particular mission could entail, and reduced Dean's argument to the lowest common denominator. "Really? You really think you're well enough to be a part of this mission?"

"Yeah, Sam. That's what I said. Which words are giving you trouble?" Dean bit down on the inside of his cheek and attempted to tamp down his rising anger, knowing it would get him nowhere with Sam.

"And your leg? Colin said we're looking at a twelve-hour drive, at least, just to get to the house. You think it's healed enough for that? It's really strong enough to handle that kind of trip?"

Dean's jaw ticked, and he resisted the urge to knead away the pain suddenly shooting through his shin. _Like Pavlov's fucking bell._ "Yeah. It's fine."

"Great." Said like he wasn't buying it for a second, and Sam took a step closer to Dean, purposefully crowding his personal space. "And you're shooting steady enough?"

Dean snapped and surged forward a step, mimicking his brother's movements and refusing to back down. "Say _enough_ one more time, Sammy. Really. I dare you."

Sam sighed and dropped his hands onto his hips, a casual posture he only made when he was actually tense as a fucking board. The look he gave Dean was one that hadn't been warranted in quite some time, something eerily similar to all those teachers who knew he didn't have his homework when they were collecting. Like he just wasn't doing as well as expected. "Look, you're my big brother, and I'd do anything for you. But I'm not going to put more lives at risk because you feel helpless."

Dean wanted to take offense to Sam's words, he did, but he was smart enough to realize the logic in his brother's statement. It might be a risk, to others as well as himself, for Dean to accompany a team on a mission. However, he hadn't ever been one to let something as trivial as logic stand in his way, and he certainly wasn't about to start now. "You can't stop me, Sam. I'm in this just as much as you are."

Sam, on the other hand, had something of an unhealthy respect for logic, and it wasn't often that he let it fall to the wayside. But when he did, he put it _all_ out there. When he did, marks were left, both inside and out. The struggle for control played out over his features, and his eyebrows pulled together in a way that made him appear younger by a decade, and worried, always, for his big brother. It was a recognizable, anxious look, like he feared Dean might shatter into a million jagged pieces right in front of him or murder everyone in the bunker with the blunt end of a hammer, but damned if he knew which. A familiar worry that wavered between concern and wariness, and Dean resigned himself to wait his brother out, but a man could die of old age while Sam Winchester tried to decide exactly what he was feeling.

Sam's jaw ticked. Wariness it was. "Look, Dean, I know you feel responsible for these people – "

"I _am_ responsible for these people, Sam. We both are." Dean stepped closer to his brother, continuing in a harsh whisper as sounds of conversation in the hallway drew nearer. "This…" He gestured emphatically to encompass as wide a territory as he could manage. "All of _this._ It's on us." _It's on ME._ "We brought about the end of the world." Sam was supposed to understand where he was coming from, but Dean had been on the fringes of the battle for so long, apparently long enough for them fall out of sync all over again. It wasn't supposed to be this hard, and Dean felt desperation and frustration rising like fire in his gut, and found himself lashing out at his brother. "Because _you_ wouldn't let it go when I told you to. Because you had to keep pushing." It wasn't true, not entirely, and he didn't mean it, but in the blink of an eye, it was too late for take-backs.

Sam's head jerked back as if he'd been physically struck by the accusation behind Dean's words. "Wouldn't let it _go_? Dean, you could have died! Or worse!"

Dean rejected the thought with a jerk of his head. "I had a plan."

"Well, it was a stupid plan."

"It was my choice to make! Mine, Sam."

"Like dying had been _my_ choice to make?" And discretion be damned, because Sam was making all sorts of noise now, heaving all manner of off-limit remembrances at Dean. "A choice you ignored, by tricking me into letting an angel in? And, oh yeah, getting Kevin killed?"

There was a moratorium on bringing up some of the less palatable discretions in their respective pasts, and Dean might have asked for it, but Sam was crossing a line now. One he drew himself, and Dean was too surprised to be properly stung. "That's different, and you know it."

"How?" Sam exploded, throwing his arms wide. "Tell me, Dean, why is it okay for you to sacrifice your life, but not okay for me to sacrifice mine?"

"Because it just is!"

Sam shook his head, returning his hands to his hips. "That's not good enough, Dean, and it's not fair."

"Well, too damn bad. Because you know what, Sam? What little life is left, it ain't fair, and it never will be."

They stared each other down for a few beats, Sam's chest heaving and Dean's leg aching, but they could go toe-to-toe in stubbornness for all of eternity, however short that may be.

Dean knew, probably better than anyone, exactly how short it might just be, so he spoke up first. "Look, Sammy, I'm gonna make this real simple for you. You can either let me come with you, or I can follow you." He shrugged. "Either way, I'm not sitting this one out."

Sam's eyes narrowed and his jaw visibly clenched. He jerked his head, just slightly, just enough to telegraph his next move.

Dean went to sidestep the strike, but his leg was throbbing for real now and he was off his game and he wasn't nearly quick enough to completely dodge the thrust of Sam's long-ass arm, a thrust that ended with his sizeable palm connecting right above the junction of Dean's left shoulder.

The motion wasn't rough or aggressive. It was simply a period to be put on this conversation. A statement, and Sam sure made it, because Dean was knocked too easily off-balance, spun on his bad leg and sent stumbling over his own lingering weakness into the wall. His elbows, shoulders and head slammed in succession against the unyielding tile at his back. Enough to smart, sure, but there was more harm done to his pride. There was a brief pause in which he clung to the wall by his fingertips in an attempt to keep himself from sliding all the way to the floor, and in that moment he wasn't sure whether he felt more betrayed by his brother or his body.

Dean glared up at Sam, and if he didn't know any better, he'd say the son of a bitch seemed pretty damn pleased with himself over this little display. "What the hell, Sam?" he demanded, pushing off of the wall. He surged forward and threw an awkward retaliatory shove at his brother, and barely managed to knock Sam back a single step.

Sam bounced forward, nostrils flaring as he grabbed a handful of Dean's sleeve, pulling him close and getting in his face. "Tell me again, Dean," he fumed steadily, "that you are ready to do anything more than get us killed."

"Dammit, Sam, I'm trying to keep you alive!" Dean argued, all but shouting himself now, and wrenching free of his brother's grasp. He threw a hand toward the open doorway. "Keep _them_ alive!"

Sam remained unimpressed. "How? By forcing your way onto a mission when you can barely stand? When you can hardly shoot straight? Please, Dean, explain to me how that's gonna help me. Or anyone."

"My shooting is just fine – "

Sam didn't seem to want to hear it, grabbed Dean once more and spun him on his feet while the words were still in his mouth, yanking him too easily out of the room and suggesting with a fierce heave forward that he start walking. He seethed down Dean's neck the entire length of the hallway, pushing and pulling him in the direction he wanted his brother to walk. So maybe it wasn't a period Sam was trying to put on the conversation after all, but more of a semicolon.

Despite the creeping flush of anger and humiliation at being manhandled in such a way, Dean knew his brother enough to know when to push back and when to let Sam think he was in control. He'd seen a lot of variations of his brother over the years, and this current, all-grown-up version of the once gawky geek did not take kindly to being fucked with, so Dean allowed himself to be steered and marched through the thankfully empty halls until they ended up in the shooting gallery.

He blinked dumbly when Sam reached behind his back and dragged the Colt 1911 free of his waistband, slamming the pistol into the counter with a heavy _thunk_ of metal. Yeah, it was pretty obvious that Dean had gone and pushed his brother steamrolling right past mad into that old school brand of Sam Winchester fury that only surfaced when Dean was snugly straddling the line between _stubborn_ and _hypocrite._

Dean jutted his chin and chose a side, gripping tightly to his own personal brand of pure, unadulterated and bullheaded stubbornness. He started to fold his arms over his chest but Sam pursed his lips, grabbed Dean's right hand and yanked it downward, holding it firmly over the grip of the gun. "Sam – "

"No, Dean. No." Sam pushed down on Dean's hand until he winced, fingers instinctually curling around the grip. "You take this gun, and you hit that target, and then we'll talk about you getting back out there."

 _Bitch,_ Dean thought, ripping the gun and his own hand free of Sam's grasp. He turned to face the target and squared his shoulders. He'd been taking target practice every morning, and he was more or less relaxed with the familiar gun in his grip, even with Sam breathing down his neck and scrutinizing his every move. He raised the 1911, lines up the shot only to drop his shoulder, just a fraction, when the target blurred.

"Whenever you're ready."

Not a dare, or a comfort. Just a steadily spoken reassurance that, all shouting aside, Sam knew exactly what this was about.

Dean squeezed off his shots. One, two, three, four, and the paper target jerked with the impact of each fired bullet.

When Sam dragged the target forward, the center bullseye was sufficiently thrashed from the shots, but Dean couldn't help but wince, watching his brother study the end result. It should have been a tight enough grouping, but he was sick of settling for tight _enough,_ and Sam was very much looking to make a point.

He was no good to anyone while he was cooped up here, and that was the only point Dean figured should matter. This wasn't the way to get back on his game, locked away in the cold, stale bowels of the bunker, barely more than utterly worthless and trying to stay sharp by shooting at pieces of paper. He needed to be _out there,_ on a mission. In the action. That was when he'd be better, and back to himself. Not just good _enough_ but GOOD.

"Happy?" Dean set the still-cooling Colt on the counter, fingers remaining curled around the grip, and turned to face his brother, wary of the answer. Which was no answer, and that was answer enough. He may not have shot on par with his own standards, but clearly better than Sam had expected. "I told you. I'm fine. I'm good. I'm ready to get out of here."

Like a dog with a friggin' bone, Sam just wasn't ready to give up that easily, and he raised his eyebrows, clinging to those last words out of Dean's mouth. "Out of where, exactly? Because this is, maybe, the second time I've even seen you out of your room this week."

"Well, you've been a bit busy," Dean returned coolly, "and I haven't exactly been invited to the top secret meetings lately, have I?"

"Dean…"

Dean waved his left hand, his right still clutching his gun and resting atop the counter in a way he hoped looks casual, and not so much like a necessary lifeline to remain standing. "Whatever, man. I can do this. I mean, I know I was sort of bad off before, but – "

Sam snorted. "Sort of bad off? Do you have any idea what you…" He licked his lips and dropped his gaze to the ground, releasing a long breath, and with it, whatever anger he was gripping on the trek down. What was left was something akin to pity, that damn look on his face again, like Dean was liable to snap or break. "It almost killed Cas to heal you, Dean. To _save_ you."

Dean tried, and likely horribly failed, to hide his grimace, knowing full well what it had taken from the angel to heal his injuries. Of which there had been more than plenty. He hadn't had to bear witness to most of it, had been dropped into some kind of angelically-induced coma for the first two weeks of what would become a month-long process before he could accomplish something as simple as sitting up in his own bed without assistance. But he'd had to look Cas in the face for some of it, and the strain put on his friend was an impossible thing to miss.

All the more reason for Dean to go on this mission, to prove he was more than a liability, more than torn flesh angel-duct-taped together and stretched across a freshly assembled jigsaw puzzle of previously broken bones. "Look." He prepared to fortify his argument, took a breath deep enough to remind him of those recent breaks, and just how bad off he'd really been. No bullshit coating needed, just a private, all too real memory of soul-crunching agony even Sam couldn't properly understand. "This spell in that chapter house in Upland…it's big, right? It's important. We should have our best people out there."

"We will," Sam said pointedly.

"Damn it, we've already lost six people this month, Sam."

Sam looked honestly taken aback that Dean knew that, but just because he hadn't been by their side didn't mean he wasn't feeling the hit each time someone from their side had gone down. The guilt was tearing him apart in ways the Hollow Men couldn't even dream about.

"Good people," Dean continued, "who shouldn't…it should be _me_ out there."

"And it will be." Sam's eyes slid down to where Dean's gun hand was resting on the counter, and he followed his brother's gaze, saw his hand twitching with a slight tremble he hadn't even registered and couldn't quite still. "When you're strong enough," he said, softer.

Dean jerked his hand away from the weapon, stuffing it into his pocket instead. He squared his shoulders and balanced his weight between both legs while pressing down on the injured wince that threatened to give him up once and for all. "You need me," he said seriously. "You need me out there to tell you if things are gonna go south. You're losing more people without me than you would with me, and you know it. You know that, Sam. And something this big? It's too risky to take on without that kind of advantage."

Sam's eye twitched, and Dean recognized that tic as stone number one. "Cas can do it."

Dean scoffed, playing it up. "Cas? Yeah, sure, he can sense…" He couldn't say it. He just couldn't. " _Them,_ well enough, but they can sense him, too. He might as well be a damn homing beacon. And besides, we both know that I can feel them coming from much farther away."

Sam tensed at that, brows pulling together. Despite his words, Dean knew that bit of information was likely brand new to his brother. The connection he shared with the Hollow Men, with the infected…this was probably the most they'd ever spoken of it.

Sam closed his eyes and rubbed his fingertips into the center of his forehead. That last point of Dean's had been meant to serve as his checkmate, and if he'd left Sam this much without an argument, he may have succeeded. "You really," he said finally. "And I mean _really_ , think you're strong enough to do this?" He was just overcompensating, and probably didn't mean to sound like a dick as he asked it.

Dean folded his arms over his chest. "Sam…"

His brother held up his hands between them. "I get it. Or, some of it, at least. I do. This is your fight just as much as it's mine – "

Dean made an incredulous noise in his throat.

"Okay," Sam conceded. "Maybe even more so. But that doesn't automatically mean you're going to be anything more than a liability out there. What happens if you get just a little too trigger happy? Or, God forbid, something gets the drop on you?"

Dean had long ago grown immune to Sam's seemingly endless barrage of nightmare hypotheticals. Unfazed, he brushed them away with an easy _pfft_ of breath. "Why don't you let me worry about me?"

Sam shook his head, finding some nondescript spot on the wall to occupy his gaze as he worried his lower lip, losing ten years in the blink of an eye. He made one last vague attempt at a rebuttal, even though it was already obvious who'd won here. Dean had chipped away, bit by bit. At Sam's stubborn resolve, at his arguments. He didn't have a good enough reason to force Dean to stay behind, and he knew it.

"Then what about this, Dean?" Sam threw a last-ditch, Hail Mary point of his finger toward the targets hanging at the end of the range. "What if it was me down there instead of a piece of paper? Would you honestly be able to not hit me right now?"

It felt like a low blow, but it was supposed to. Dean responded in kind, jerking his head. "Why don't you take a walk and we'll find out?" He clenched his jaw, and it _clicked_ painfully. "No, you know what? I don't need this shit, Sam. I've been on the wrong end of a lot of bad crap. Enough to know when I'm ready to get back in the fight. And I'm ready."

Sam dropped his arms to his side, and his hands smacked dully against his thighs. It sounded a lot like defeat, and that was something Dean could too easily recognize. "Dean…"

Dean threw a hand up, cutting off whatever valiantly pointless thing his brother was thinking about saying, and grabbed his Colt 1911 from the counter, tucking in back into the waistband of his jeans. He stepped purposefully around Sam, patting him roughly on the shoulder as he passed. "Let's go, Sammy. We're burnin' daylight."

* * *

 _To be continued..._


	3. Part III

**For What It's Worth**

 _Part III_

* * *

Dean glanced at his watch, sighed a Sam-sized sigh and rubbed his eyes. It was entirely possible he'd managed to forget exactly how boring driving through the night could be, especially when he wasn't the one behind the wheel. Which was precisely why he was _always_ the one behind the wheel. But not this time. _Fucking Sam and his conditions._ Little brother might cave every now and then, but he didn't do so easily, and certainly not without feeling like he still got his way. "Wish I'd been payin' more attention when you guys were talking about how far this damn house was."

There was no radio signal left to pick up and the CD player in the Jeep was jacked to the point of being useless even if he _did_ have CDs in his possession, and Sam didn't seem all that keen on conversing with his big brother at the moment, as grumpy and sullen in the driver's seat as he was when he was twenty-two. The cold, deliberate silence was making for a ride that was excruciatingly uncomfortable in every imaginable way. Even the Jeep was too quiet for Dean's liking, engine a hair too small and lacking the aggressive yet reassuring growl of the Impala. There was no telling anymore when there would be cause for off-roading or rappelling or any number of issues or obstacles that had never before factored into their relatively simple life of hunting spirits and demons, and as he and the others had loaded up assorted yet coordinated gear into the pair of tall, mud-splattered SUVs better suited to the unpredictable landscape beyond the bunker, he had spared a glance back at his discarded girl where she'd been covered and stashed away into a dark corner for the better part of a year.

 _Maybe next time, baby,_ he'd thought, vainly, all the while knowing she might never see the outside world again. And for that, she might have been the luckiest of them all. Only the faintest bit of polished black metal could be glimpsed beneath a rumpled corner of the hideous blue tarp, and every fiber of Dean's being had wanted to cross the crowded expanse of the dim garage and tuck her in tightly, but he didn't, knowing how important it was to keep his head in the game if he wanted to keep playing.

Sam huffed out one of his trademark unamused laughs, breaking Dean out of his reverie. He didn't take his eyes off the dark road but jerked his chin a little. "Well, you're the one who wanted to come."

"Yeah, whatever," Dean mumbled. He propped his arm on the ledge of the car door and tried to stretch out his sore left leg as discreetly as possible, the limb not happy with the hours already spent cramped and stiff. To better hide his wince from his eagle-eyed brother, he forcefully redirected his gaze out of the window to his right, only to earn himself another face full of what had happened since the last time he was outside of the bunker.

Dean had become personally and intimately familiar with the damage and destruction that now painted the surface of…well, everything. Destruction that was a direct consequence of the choices he and his brother had made, and the decisions they couldn't ever take back. After everything, he should hardly have found himself shocked by how far and wide it stretched. Even so, the few parts inside himself that hadn't yet been torn and broken since the world succumbed to the Darkness and her obsessed pets painfully cracked as the Jeep moved further through the barren gray landscape, seemingly swallowed by it.

 _Dead._ A simple thought, and the only one that came to mind as Dean's eyes roamed the broken ground, felled trees and collapsed cityscape. He should have been dead, too. He knew that, as surely as he knew there was something familiar about this particular former cityscape. He straightened in his seat and frowned, eyes trained on the crumbled skeleton of a small downtown-esque skyline that tugged at something weak and fragile he'd locked away a long, long time ago.

And then Dean saw it approaching on their right, the rusty, off-kilter interstate exit sign for Cicero, and all of the oxygen seemed to be sucked out of the vehicle, a giant vacuum stealing his ability to breathe or think with anything resembling clarity.

If he'd known the route to Upland was going to take them past this place, he maybe wouldn't have fought like he did to come along. This wasn't a sight he needed to see or an assumption he needed to make, and it hit him with the force of a brick wall, a full-body blow that paralyzed him where he sat, breath caught in his throat, heart frozen in his chest, and left leg twinging like it was being twisted and shattered all over again.

He wasn't sure how many more times he could get up from the mat and keep swingin.' He wasn't sure how many more times he could possibly be expected to.

Dean stared at the sign as the Jeep passed, and he wondered if she made it out, if she and the kid were scared but safe in the company of other hunters taking in uninfected survivors like they were. Knew better, looking at the ravaged scenery, the veritable hellscape laid out around them. The life in the city was gone, an obvious emptiness. No one got out of there.

She must have been terrified, without a clue what was going on. He'd taught her how to shoot, and how to go to ground. How to ward the house against at least a dozen things. She wasn't helpless, or stupid, and they might have stood a chance, if he hadn't made Cas –

"Dean."

Sam's voice had a touch of calm, careful urgency to it, had lost the edge of tension and annoyance from earlier. Because unlike Dean he always had his head in the game, and he was calling his brother back to the present, back to the task at hand.

Dean swallowed, tearing his eyes from the wasted scene passing by and planting them instead on the dusty dashboard, seeking out a crack in the plastic instead of granting Sam the connection he's searching for. "Yeah."

"Look…I know what you're thinking, man, and just…just _don't_. Okay?"

"We did this, Sam." Dean ignored him and spoke steadily, quietly. A statement of fact which couldn't be refuted. "And we can pussyfoot around it all you want, but we…we killed these people."

The Jeep slowed noticeably as Sam took the next exit ramp, almost like he was trying to put the metaphorical brakes on the conversation as well as the vehicle, but he didn't respond. He didn't launch either an argument, or a reassurance. And, hell, how could he?

 _Yeah._ Dean returned his elbow to the door, putting more distance between himself and his brother, leaning into the contact with a surface as hard as he wished he could be. "So I guess we're done speculating, huh?"

Sam followed his big brother's lead just like he did when they were younger. "Speculating what?"

"Whether or not the world would have been better off without us."

Dean's words rendered his brother speechless, without argument, once more. So at least there was one thing he was still good at.

Despite what he'd said before, he didn't blame Sam. Not anymore, at least. He used to, sometimes, when the wounds were fresh, when he was alone and feeling it and the whiskey hit him just right. _Why didn't you do like I asked and let it GO, Sammy? Why did you have to dig and dig? We would've been done, and none of this would have happened._

Sam suddenly swerved to the left to avoid the wide trunk of a tree that had fallen and blocked the road, tires digging into the loose mix of gravel and dirt as they dipped off of the pavement and the side of Dean's head snapped roughly against the window as his elbow slipped from its perch.

When Sam righted the Jeep the road was just GONE.

Gone without warning or ceremony or Sam seeing the drop-off in time to do any more than spit a heartfelt " _Jesus_ " and execute a clumsy, frantic stomp on the brakes, bringing the vehicle to a sudden, jerky stop at an angle across the seemingly chewed upon road, front passenger-side tire mere feet from the edge of the unnatural cliff face.

Dean had the church bells ringing in his head but that was always when his self-preservation was at its strongest, and he instinctively leaned forward and to the left, bracing a hand on the dash and blinking hard as he peered through the wide windshield at the view of destruction before them, eyes dipping to the drop-off on his concerningly immediate right. "Son of a…"

A yawning trench stretched as far as he can see, on either side of the road, cutting through field and cityscape alike. It looked horrifyingly as though something massive and malevolent, something capable of unimaginable destruction, had come down from the sky and taken a swipe at the earth. Just reached down and scooped away structures both manmade and natural, and any human or animal life that had been its path, leaving behind a sense of hopeless ruin.

"Dean." Sam's unease was palpable, so much so that it might as well have been occupying the space in the cabin between them. His eyes were wide and horrified as he took in the sights surrounding them. "Are we…I mean, can you tell if we're safe here?" Sam was hesitant in his inquiry, but he'd been a part of this devastated, jacked-up world for exactly as long as Dean had, and while that wasn't something you ever really get used to, it wasn't the views of a desolate, wrecked world, not even the possible presence of the Hollow Men that were making him nervous.

Dean's inexplicable ability to sense when they or any of the infected were near had proven to be of use in the past, and it was most definitely the only reason Sam finally consented to letting him come along, but that didn't mean his little brother felt comfortable with it, not with the thought that Dean had any sort of connection to the sinister beings that could create scenes like this very one _just_ _because_. Strange, maybe, considering all of the whackado abilities Sam had in the past, himself.

Dean was pretty sure he knew immediately that they were in the clear, as he didn't feel the biting, bitter and all-encompassing cold that the Hollow Men or the infected brought with them. But all the same, he took a second, sending his eyes on a cautious circuit of the landscape and stalling, so as not to scare Sam with exactly how easily the answer came to him. He nodded, a quick dip of his chin. "We're good."

Still, Sam took his sweet time in returning the motion, swallowing roughly as his head bobbed like a buoy in choppy waters. "Okay." He reached immediately to pop open the door of the Jeep, and didn't protest as Dean followed him out to assist in categorizing the exact level of Fucked in which they'd just found themselves.

He'd thought the little corner of the bunker he'd carved out for himself was quiet, but there was the deliberate silence of self-imposed solitude, and then there was the absolute, unquestionable stillness that was the notable absence of life. And between the two, a canyon cut as wide as this one.

He knew this was the world now, he _knew_ it and they'd spent the past several hours traveling through it, but it was still a shock to the system to be faced with it all over again, _really_ faced with it and standing in the middle of a canvas of destruction that stretched as far as his straining eyes could manage to take in. Dean absorbed each perceived loss of life as a separate blow, sucked in a harsh, painful breath like felt a little like dying in itself.

"Dean?"

Sam's tone of voice was a rarely heard one of quiet distress, one survivor to another, and Dean couldn't quite process the full weight of what his brother was asking of him. He shook his head, wincing and ghosting fingertips over his pounding, hot-feeling though thankfully intact temple, and stepped gingerly around the nose of the Jeep, palming the warm hood as he warily watched the compromised ground beneath his boots.

Sam motioned for Colin and Jackson in the second idling Jeep to stay where they were for the moment, while they assessed the situation and figured out their next move.

Dean crouched carefully near the edge, which wasn't quite as straight or violent a drop as he'd initially thought, nor was it a distance that wasn't traversable to reach the other side. He wavered a bit on the balls of his feet, was forced to drop fingertips to the dirt to brace himself. There were options, he could see that now; swaths of rocky terrain to carry them to the floor of the crevasse and across the divide. The damage wasn't new and the ground seemed to be sturdy, should hold the weight of the vehicles on the descent. He felt Sam come up behind him.

"Any ideas?"

 _Run like hell, and don't look back._ Dean squinted, rocked back on his heels and brushed the dirt from his hand across the thigh of his jeans. "Gonna take some off-roading, that's for damn sure, but we should be able to get across."

Sam didn't answer, narrowed eyes searching the drop-off.

Dean straightened, bumped his brother with an elbow and forced a smile. "If you're scared, I can drive."

Sam threw the gearshift into 'park' outside a stretch of tall, rusted wrought iron fencing, but didn't move to take the keys from the ignition. He tapped the steering wheel, a quick succession of fingertips that had always been the sign of a winding pitch, of a looming conversation of a somewhat serious nature. "Hey, Dean, hold up a sec."

Dean froze, fingers wrapped around the door handle and left leg aching, screaming its protest at not yet being permitted to flex and move around freely. His eyes darted all over, passed over the tall fence beyond the dirty windshield, possibly the sturdiest structure they'd come across in hours and most likely dosed with salt and marked with all manner of protective warding. His watch told him the sun should have been more than visible by now, but an eerie, possibly permanent cloud cover continued to mar the sky overhead. "What is it?"

Sam ignored him for a moment, cranked the window and leaned out to wave for the others to make their way up to the chapter house before settling back against his seat with a sigh. He didn't look at Dean as he spoke. "You're limping."

Dean blinked, but felt a cold sweat break out on his palm where it was gripping the rough plastic of the handle. He used to be a lot better about these things, concealing aches and pains from his brother. Back when he was a better salesman, back when Sam was still buying what he was selling. "I'm really not," he protested, with an attempt at an easy grin. "I'm pretty sure I'm just sitting here. You know, wasting time on a very important mission."

Sam rotated to face him, perching a stiff wrist atop the cracked, weathered steering wheel. "You're damn right this is an important mission, Dean, and you were limping when you got in the car, and it was worse when we stopped before." He shook his head. "I'm not other people, man. I know what you went through, and I don't care what you said back at the bunker. You've been fidgeting the entire drive like your leg's bothering you."

"I've been sitting in this crap heap for the last twelve hours, Sam. What do you expect? Everything's bothering me." When Sam remained both unmoved and unamused, Dean put his shoulder blade against the door and dropped his gaze to his hands. " _You're_ bothering me," he muttered.

Sam rolled his eyes. "Be straight with me, man. No more lies, and no more jokes." He pursed his lips. "Can you do this?"

Dean quirked an eyebrow. "What, walk into a house and walk back? Yeah, I think I'll find a way to manage."

"You can hang back. Sound the alarm from here."

"By what, Sam? Shouting real loud? Drawing any infected straight to us?"

Sam leaned over, popped the glove box and pulled out a pair of walkie-talkies, offered one to Dean with raised eyebrows.

Dean glared. "Hell no, Sam. I'm not staying behind in the car like I'm friggin' five." Never once had to, and he had no intention of breaking that streak.

Sam replaced the walkies in the glove box and slammed the compartment shut. He sat back against the seat and sighed, not the seething one or even the exasperated one, but the new, patient and controlled one he'd had ever since Dean got laid up. "You shouldn't be here." Said as a general statement of dissatisfied fact.

At least he'd had the courtesy to wait for Jackson and the jackass to make their way out of earshot this time before starting again in with all this shit. Dean exhaled roughly, and a phantom pain ricocheted through his ribcage. He turned the reflexive wince that cut across his face into a sour look that would rival a vintage expression of his brother's. "Look, Sam, if you're just gonna bitch – "

"I'm not." Sam sighed again, definitely the exasperated one this time. It was almost a familiar comfort to hear it. "Really. I just had to say it one more time, see if you'd gotten any more sense in your head since we left the bunker."

Dean cocked his head, feigned considering but was already reaching once more for the door handle. "Doesn't look like it."

Sam nodded, squared his jaw. And – _okay –_ he might have turned the corner all the way back to pissed by this point, and he wasn't putting sugar on it. "Okay, then." He left the keys jutting out of the ignition, standard protocol, because there was never the guarantee that the driver would be one of the ones who made it back.

They made short work of the walk to the house, Dean's leg griping and grumbling the entire way as he struggled to keep up with Sam's long told-you-so strides. By the time they met up with the others about fifty yards out, he couldn't argue the sweat that had broken out at his temples and could only hope the shadows of the lingering unnatural darkness were enough to cover his increasing discomfort on a relatively cool day.

Sam cast a cursory glance around the property, eyes and flashlight beam passing over the former chapter house and current waste of space, then turned to Colin and nodded once. "Watch the perimeter."

The former soldier was clearly unhappy drawing guard dog duty, and glared at Dean as they passed, muttered, "Freak," under his breath.

Like he wouldn't give his gimpy left leg not to have this odd connection with the Hollow Men or anything else that had been touched but the Darkness. Sam shot Colin a very specific look but Dean didn't rise to the bait, not verbally, at least. He simply returned the sentiment with a grin and a wink.

"Sam, no one's given this place a thought since long before the Darkness was let out," he observed as they stepped onto the wide porch, steps bending and creaking under the weight. He squinted up at the sunken, sprawling Victorian, its paint chipped, peeling and faded to shades of gray that perfectly matched the sky above, and bit down hard against the words he _wanted_ to say. _Since long before we_ let _the Darkness out._

Dean covered his unease with a low whistle. Every window looked blown out, frames cracked and splintered without a trace of glass left to be found. A tree seemed to have grown straight up through the roof of the porch and died that way, thick gnarled branches clinging to rotted gutters and climbing a crumbing brick chimney.

"Yeah, well, the Men of Letters haven't exactly been around, have they?" Peering in through a large gap in the western-facing front of the house that was presumably a picture window once offering beautiful sunset views, Sam spoke in a hushed tone, like someone or something might have been listening in on the exchange.

"I'm just sayin', if Magnus hid something here…I mean, Sam, it looks like a goddamned _bomb_ went off. There isn't even any furniture left in this place."

Sam reached out with his left hand, tested the large, ornately carved knob, and the front door creaked and folded open into the dark house. He turned back, met the eyes of Dean and Jackson in turn and motioned them both inside.

Sam was in the zone, face set as he sent his flashlight beam searching the rubble of the large but otherwise empty first floor. He stepped gingerly around a pile of broken glass and shifted a fallen roof beam aside with his boot, and Dean squinted up at the matching hole in the ceiling. "Jackson, you stay down here. Dean, upstairs with me."

Dean rolled his eyes as he followed his _little brother's_ orders and cautiously climbed the wide staircase, wary of the sturdiness, or lack thereof, of each riser. "Sam," he persisted, grimacing as he collected a palm full of dust and grime from the banister. He contemplated wiping the mess on the back of Sam's jacket but settled for a swipe down the thigh of his own jeans. "There's nothing left here, man."

Dean felt he only _slightly_ deserved the deliberate lack of attention his brother was paying him. Sam didn't even spare him a glance as he surveyed the long hallway at the top of the staircase, walls lighter in patches where artwork once hung and branches of that big-ass tree outside invading the second story through empty windowpanes. He paused for just a moment, then wordlessly took two hard rights and disappeared into a room off of the hall.

Dean shook his head and hurried to follow the stubborn son a bitch, forgot to watch where he was putting his feet and his weaker leg came up just a step short of its intended landing zone, caught in a warped floorboard on the threshold and pitched him sideways into the doorframe.

 _Fantastic_ , he thought. Then, _OW._ Dean straightened and rubbed his shoulder, sneering down at the traitorous spot in the hardwood. He raised his gaze to confirm Sam hadn't caught this latest display of his seemingly perpetual weakness, but frowned and whipped it back immediately to the floor. He cocked his head as his tired but well-trained eyes zeroed in on something foreign caught between the boards.

Dean dropped swiftly to one knee and tucked his flashlight under an armpit, then dragged his switchblade from his back pocket. He stuck the knife between the slats and pried the loose board free. It came off roughly in his hand, rocking him back on his heels. _Well, I'll be damned. Again._ "Hey, Sam – "

"No." Across the room, Sam shook his head stubbornly as he trailed the beam of his flashlight along the grimy crown molding overhead. "No, it has to be here somewhere. We didn't come all this way just to – "

"SAM."

"WHAT?"

Dean raised his eyebrows at his brother, held the board aloft and pointed to the gap he'd uncovered in the hardwood.

Sam's eyes widened and he rushed to crouch next to Dean. He carefully worked the folded scrap of paper free and blew away a bit of dust, then inspected the writing in the glow of their two flashlights, silently moving his lips as he read the overly swirly, familiar-looking scrawls.

He turned to Dean with a dropped jaw. "This whole damn house, and you just happen to TRIP over the exact piece of paper we're looking for in the first room we try?"

So maybe he had caught the show, after all. "I know. I'm awesome." Dean grinned, gave Sam's shoulder a gentle shove. "Told you that you need me."

Sam jerked his head, shaking his hair from his eyes as he slowly straightened, still staring at the bit of yellowed paper. "This is…Dean, if this spell works, do you know what this means?"

"No, not really. So how about we get it back to the bunker and then…" Dean's attention and eyes were drawn away to roam the empty room and he reached out to grip his brother's sleeve. But whether he was holding Sam back or keeping him close, he couldn't honestly say. "Sam, hold up."

"What?"

"Shut up." He heard it again, a muffled _thump_ from somewhere downstairs, and Jackson had been part of the group long enough to know to immediately claim such a sound if he was the one making it. "We're not alone."

The color fell out of Sam's face and he spun, eyes landing on any doorway or window available to escape from. He quickly tucked the spell away into an inside pocket of his jacket and his knuckles whitened as they curled around the grip of his pistol. A weapon that was as handy as any against the infected but would prove absolutely ineffectual against the Hollow Men, but there was just no shaking decades-ingrained instinct. "It is the – "

"No," Dean was just as quick to correct, fingers tightening around his own gun. He was sure of that, as sure as he'd been at that impasse on the way here. It wasn't…wasn't her lapdogs crawling the perimeter of the house, but that didn't mean there wasn't a threat nearby. "But just…shh." Dean threw a stiff hand at his brother, waving at the floor and signaling him to get down.

Sam did so, then jerked his head at the open window across the room. Dean wasn't exactly looking forward to a second-story drop, but if it turned out to be their only means of egress, then he and his worthless leg would just have to make do.

He nodded, forgetting for a moment to keep his eyes on the door and instead instinctively, protectively watched his little brother's six as Sam inched his way to the window in the far wall. Forgetting that Sam hadn't been the one who'd needed looking after lately.

There was just no mistaking the soft _click_ of a safety being thumbed off, mere inches behind him. And, yeah, this one was pretty obviously on Dean.

* * *

 _To be continued..._


	4. Part IV

**For What It's Worth**

 _Part IV_

* * *

For a split-second, he honestly thought it was some sort of coup, that Colin was looking to prove him right and that he really was as big an asshole as Dean had been saying; that the son of a bitch walked straight up to them thinking he was going to take command of their operation by the barrel of his Glock. But when Dean slowly rotated to investigate the sound, he found himself eye-to-narrowed-eye with a petite, strikingly featured woman with the business end of her own Glock aimed right at his face.

"Hey, there," she greeted drily, dark eyes narrowed in a severe expression that let Dean know she wasn't afraid to pull the trigger. She lifted her chin at his 1911, a shank of dark, side-swept bangs to rival Sam's falling away from her forehead. "I wanna see any weapons on the floor, now."

Sam held up a hand as he turned to face the addition in the room. He complied quickly but stiffly, crouching to set his Beretta soundlessly against the dusty floor. Dean rolled his eyes and follows suit, adding his own gun to the pile. They moved in tandem to straighten but she stopped them with a scoff.

"Keep going." She wasn't fooled, knew they were carrying more than the handguns; their second sign that, should they all manage to walk out of there in one piece, this woman was someone that could prove a useful addition to the Merry Band of the Not-Yet-Dead. The first, of course, being the way she got the drop on them, which wasn't something either of them was likely to live down any time soon. You know, assuming they could talk their way out of being shot here, because she had a look in her eyes that Dean recognized and himself carried. They certainly wouldn't be the first ones to die by her hand.

Dean met Sam's concerned, pointed gaze and raised his eyebrows. Wordlessly, they removed a total of five blades between them, and Sam, always going above and beyond, saw fit to drop the lock pick as well.

When he'd drawn himself to his full height, hands raised non-threateningly but with one last knife still pressed comfortingly against his ribs beneath the cover of his shirt, Dean went with his gut and jerked his chin at the woman. Or, specifically, at her gun. "You got a lot of experience using that thing?"

Her left eyes twitched, and her grip on the pistol tightened. "Enough."

"So you know what's out there?" Dean gestured toward the broken window, feeling a chilly breeze work its way into the room as he did. He waited for her nod. "Then you have to know we've got out shit together a little more than – "

"Than the infected?" She barked a rough sound, her lip twitching upward. "Maybe." The aim of her gun had yet to waver in the slightest. This standoff might have been a lot of things, but it was not her first rodeo. "You'd be surprised what I've seen people do," she said, confirming his suspicions. "Infected or not."

 _So she knows about the infected._ Clearly thinking the same thing, Sam met Dean's eyes and gave a barely perceptible nod, the go-ahead to keep talking. Because if there was one thing Dean had always had on his side, it was his ability to talk down the crazies, with a few exceptions. He studied the woman, and there was something…familiar about her, an eerie sensation Dean was really growing sick of as this long day wore on.

She didn't seem to appreciate the look, pressed her lips together and raised the gun likes she meant to do something with it.

Sam surged forward a step and Dean stuck one hand out towards her and one back at his brother. "Hey, okay, hold on – "

She jerked her head in the negative, dark bangs shifting against her forehead and revealing a swipe of something on her cheek that could have been either dirt or blood long dried. "No, I don't think I will."

"Just _hold on_ a damn minute!" Dean snapped his fingers, pointed at her as it came to him. "Risa."

Sam looked incredulously between his brother and the gun-wielding woman across the room. "Wait – you _know_ her?"

"Sort of?" Dean winced as it all came back, flooding his senses like he'd been dunked in a tank of ice water.

" _Croatoan virus, right? That's their endgame?"_

" _It's efficient, it's incurable, and it's scary as hell. Turns people into monsters. Started hitting the major cities about two years ago. World really went in the crapper after that."_

Some of the details may have changed, but again he had to think, what was the point? They only traded one end for another, world in the crapper either way. Story of his goddamned life. And, _God_ , he was a dick. Still, hadn't seemed to hurt his chances of gettin' laid. Much. "We mighta had a, uh, connection?"

Sam groaned. "Just tell me something, Dean. Is this the first one-night stand you've had point a gun at your head?"

"Would you believe me if I said yes?"

Sam cocked his head. "Nope."

"Hey!" she barked. "Assholes! I have the gun, so why don't you talk _to_ me and not about me?"

Dean brought his hands up close to his head. "Right, okay, Risa – it's Risa, right?"

Lips pressed tightly together, her jaw twitched a wordless confirmation, and Dean could see the fear ratcheting up in her dark eyes, stepping to the front of the line. "I've never seen you before in my life."

"Yeah, because we saved the world!" Dean couldn't help but exclaim.

"Saved?" Risa stepped forward, putting herself between them and their weapons. She smiled, something tight and wounded and disbelieving. Something incredibly afraid. "There is something wrong with you."

"There's nothing _wrong_ with us – "

"No." Her eyes narrowed as they searched Dean's pale, drawn face. "No, there's something wrong with you."

Sam rotated, raised his eyebrows and gave Dean a pissy, pinched, I-told-you-so look.

"There was," Dean conceded, "I was…sick, or whatever – but, look, I'm okay, really. Not infected. Never was." He glanced at Sam and swallowed roughly, let the lie slide out unimpeded. "Neither of us."

Risa's finger tightened around the trigger as she inhaled sharply. "Yeah, I've heard that one."

Dean huffed. He reached up and hooked a finger in the collar of his t-shirt, dragged it away and tilted his neck. "Lady, do I LOOK infected to you?"

"You really want me to answer that?"

And at the end of the day, yeah, Dean figured he couldn't really fault her for the assumption. He knew he looked like shit, knew he was barely keeping his feet and was leaning badly on his left leg at that point, looking sick and sweating something fierce from the strain of simply _standing_. Of _being awake,_ and he was just as disgusted with himself as she looked to be.

Suddenly, there was sound and a flurry of movement downstairs, thumps and noises of struggle as someone decided enough is _enough,_ and those left to stand guard for both sides collided brutally.

Dean had a brief window of perfect clarity, a moment of time stood still where he met Risa's eyes and read the fear there, and he understood that her self-preservative reflex was pretty much the same as his – violence, swift and brutal and without stopping for questions, simply clearing the path towards escape.

That's how they _survived_.

But the scuffle downstairs was also distraction enough for Sam, and they were all moving, but odds were always that one of the three wouldn't be quite quick enough.

Dean's vision tunneled down to the gun barrel in his face. To the flash of the muzzle, and all sound fell away save the _crack_ of the shot.

* * *

Whoever the hell she was, she was tough and she knew it, and more importantly she wanted _them_ to know it. But she'd spooked, and telegraphed her shot. Badly.

Even so, he knew he was too slow; knew that Dean was hit, because as soon as his fingertips brushed jacket sleeve his brother was thrown from his grasp by the punch of the bullet, knocked backwards to the floor, hard, and when Sam spared that frightened glance behind him there was blood… _everywhere._

The both of them had a penchant for dying, but Dean had a habit of making an excruciatingly slow process of it. Leaving his might-be-should-be-won't-be final mark on the world a bloodied, broken mess of a man who fought to the last breath. So, in a twisted way he'd never admit to another breathing soul, for those first few seconds Sam wasn't sure he got his brother out of the path of a swiftly delivered fatal hit, it almost seemed a mercy.

But his ears perked to the _thunk_ of the bullet striking the wall behind him, and Dean, who was always full of surprises and very much alive, jerked with a startled, pained intake of air. His boots scraped and his fingers curled senselessly against the dusty, blood-splattered floorboards for a long moment before his right hand raised dazedly to cup the gory side of his head.

Save his brain, everything inside of Sam was screaming at him to run to Dean's side, but that agonized gasp was gonna have to be enough for now. He lurched forward, away from his brother, to snatch his gun from the floor. Once it was firmly in hand he spared both a glance and the nose of his Beretta in the direction of the shooter, Risa, and something about the lethal combination did well to pin her in place. Whatever distraction the melee happening downstairs had provided, it was over now.

Sam found himself not really giving a shit who won, only that this woman had just _shot_ his brother. He jerked his chin at her piece. "Drop it. Now."

She was smart enough to have realized the full extent of her mistake by that point and silently complied, flicked the safety and stooped to set her Glock on the floor just as she'd ordered them to only moments before. She startled a bit as she straightened, eyes wide and trained on Sam, probably expecting him to drop her where she stood.

And maybe he should have. But Dean was breathing and sort of moving, and knew her somehow, apparently. She was a good shot with some idea of what the hell was going on out there, and even in the utter shit heap of a moment Sam could appreciate the value in that. He nodded his satisfaction with her raised, empty hands and the guilty-as-fuck expression on her face. "Don't fucking move," he spat.

"Copy that," she conceded softly. Her lips worked like there was something else she had to say but Sam decided she and her excuses could go fuck themselves for all he cared, and he stepped back to crouch swiftly next to his brother.

Even now, even after the Darkness, after the Hollow Men and everything they did to him, Dean didn't quite know how to lie down and be beat, and he was trying to push himself upright on bloody hands that were leaving tracks along the dirty hardwood.

He thought he was done and Sam knew that. He knew his big brother thought he didn't have a damn thing left in him that could continue on or was even worth fighting for but he was _wrong._ Because Dean's pupils were shot, were all over the damn place and so was his awareness but he was still _fighting_ , right in front of the one person who would never give up on him even when he'd given up on himself _._

To literal _HELL_ with the Hollow Men, because _that_ is why Sam had conceded to let his brother come along. No other reason, because he couldn't think of anything else that mattered.

Sam gripped his brother firmly by the wrist and hauled him into a seated position, drawing a choked, pained sound from the man. Though he knew he should, he refused to make inspection of the wound his priority, pushed practices and lectures and field triage to the side for the moment and grasped Dean's bloody chin, forcing the line of that stunned gaze to match up with his own eyes. He was injured and it was bad – bullet to the goddamn _head_ bad – and Sam needed to secure _some_ degree of cognizance from his big brother, needed to know he was _okay_ and that what little movement he'd managed thus far was more than a body reflexively acknowledging pain. Needed to know Dean's hamster wheel was still spinning behind those glassy eyes.

Lost in a world of sensory overload and buried beneath what had to be a mountain of pain, Dean recoiled at his touch, and then once more when he was able to focus somewhat and found his brother right in his face, almost like he'd forgotten Sam was there.

"Hey," Sam encouraged with a tight smile, slipping his hand through the trail of bright blood streaking Dean's face to grip the back of his neck and give him a shake that was gentle and mindful while still hopefully communicating, _we're on the clock here, bro._

Dean's slick, grimy fingers rose shakily and sought out the oozing trench splitting his temple. Sam was quick to discourage the idea, guiding his brother's hand back to the relative safely of his lap, where it was less likely to fester a life-threatening infection while they were hundreds of miles away from help. Dean's wide eyes locked on his own blood-coated fingers, then rose to meet Sam's concerned gaze, plainly holding the question he was afraid to ask, assuming he was even capable of words at the moment.

"It's really not that…" Sam gulped around the lie. The very sight of the furrow the bullet had carved turned his stomach with both its location and implications, but he clamped it down, forced the steadiest, most confident grin he could muster to soften what had to be the single most asinine thing he'd ever asked. "You okay?"

Dean frowned, fingers still twitching to inspect the wound, and he took too long to respond, not like he couldn't form the words, thank God, but more like he couldn't hear Sam well, if it all. But he took his cue from the concerned look on his brother's face and nodded.

And that in itself was enough of a cue for Sam, who bounced on the balls of his feet and wrested an individually wrapped gauze pad from an inside pocket of his coat. He pressed the pack into Dean's cleanish left hand and finally whipped his full attention back to the woman, who maybe should have taken off when she had the chance. He lifted the lid off of the boiling pot inside. "What the fuck was that?!"

She rocked back a step as though physically struck by the force of his shout as it echoed across the room and Sam had half a mind to follow it up with an actual physical strike. She gaped wordlessly, eyes dancing around the dark, empty space, resting for a moment on Dean, who hadn't moved from his seated position on the floor, one leg drawn up, dazed and blood-covered and holding that gauze like he couldn't possibly have been expected to know what to do with it.

He remembered her now, or, hearing about her, at least. And as whiskey-soaked and physically specific as that description may have been, now that he was meeting her, Sam couldn't say he was entirely surprised. Any woman who could look his brother in the eye while shooting him in the head was pretty much exactly Dean's type.

She looked to be around Dean's age, though it was difficult to say and couldn't matter less. The few people they crossed paths with these days all looked like they'd been through the wringer, like they'd been chewed up and spit out the other side of a world taking the red eye to complete annihilation. Which was, to say, not completely off the mark.

Even so, there was no explanation this once-yet-never-known Risa could drum up here that could possibly justify what had just transpired, and Sam no longer cared to hear her try. He was suddenly struck by exactly how horribly, stupidly far they'd traveled from the bunker, and dropped once more into a crouch at his brother's side. He tore the gauze free of the plastic and left the packaging in a twisted heap beside his leg, guided Dean's hand up to the side of his head.

Dean blinked hard then, as pressure was applied to the wound, and it was slower in coming than Sam would have liked, the barely audible and first coherent thing he said being, "D'you shoot her?"

Sam's eyes darted to Risa across the dim room, holding up her hands and looking anxious, like she wasn't convinced he might not still do so. "No."

Dean nodded, squeezing his eyes shut as he surfed an obvious wave of pain and was hardly keeping his balance while doing so. "Good." Eyes still closed, his head bobbed in a way Sam very much recognized, like he couldn't quite decide if he needed to puke and wasn't sure he could hold it back if he did. He paled and started to fall backward but Sam reacted quickly, moved to grip him by the collar and slowed his descent back to the floor.

"Here, let me – "

"Don't _fucking_ move," Sam snapped again, without even granting Risa the benefit of eye contact, his voice low and dangerous as the fingers twisted in the collar of his brother's jacket tensed.

Still, he caught the motion in his periphery as she shrunk back and nodded once, tightly, her lips pressed into a thin, pale line.

Dean's wounded body had only a short window of time in which it was going to get its way, and even Dean knew that. His eyes worked themselves open once more, and a blood-streaked hand flapped up lazily to slap at Sam's fist on his chest, gripping tighter after contact was established and he did little more than climb his brother at that point, pawing at his arms and dragging himself back into a somewhat upright position while swiping his blood all over Sam's sleeves.

Sam executed a hasty self-inventory but wasn't sure he had anything better on his person to properly staunch such a degree of blood flow. The gauze pad he'd already handed over had been discarded onto the dirty, certainly germ and bacteria-riddled floor, and he wasn't letting it anywhere near Dean's head. As a general rule, head wounds bled like a sonuvabitch, but knowing that didn't make looking at it any easier, and this was a nasty graze.

Sam hissed as he inspected the wound, forced the downward twist of his lips into a wry grin as Dean blinked up at him. "So, do I even have to say 'I told you so'? Or was the bullet enough?"

"Bitch," Dean breathed, maneuvering himself into more or less back into a seated position, bowed over Sam's arm and focusing on a pattern of deep, deliberate inhales and exhales, and Sam was pretty damn positive at that point that he was about to cop it directly into his lap.

Then Dean sucked in a sharp breath and his fingers stiffened around Sam's upper arm in a way that he really wished he didn't recognize, a way that had his own insides running cold by association. The man's fingers were icy, radiating chilly daggers of shock that dug painfully into Sam's flesh through layers of heavy fabric and freezing his blood where it sat in his veins.

"Sam." A hoarse whisper, like Dean had screamed his voice away, and there was no mistaking the warning in that single word.

In fact, it was a warning so obvious that Sam caught additional movement out of the corner of his eye: Risa shifting her weight uneasily and inching toward the large window.

"Get down," he hissed, harsh but not loudly enough to be heard outside of this room.

She complied instantly, hitting the deck soundlessly and reaching out to secure her Glock. Sam didn't stop her, flicking off both of the flashlights and plunging the room into further darkness. They were all in the same fight now, with at least one wounded between them. It was a horrible thought, but his brother was his priority, and he had to give the others up for lost at that point. They'd already been quiet for far too long, and he was without any means of warning them what was coming.

Sam turned his attention back to Dean, who'd gone a shade of white not readily found in nature, eyelids fluttering like he was coming and going and his body wouldn't let him off the hook and choose one for him. The look wracked some fragile and long-forgotten part of Sam, but he pushed it aside and forced his insides to steel, gripped his brother tightly by the lapels of his jacket and gave Dean a shake that had his eyes blowing wide open.

Dean understood immediately, because if he'd ever been anything, it was something stronger than he thought he was. "Yeah," he rasped. "It's not…not them, Sammy."

"Not _who_?" Risa whispered, inching her way closer to where they were huddled.

 _Damn_ if he hadn't forgotten she was even there. "Believe me," Sam returned quietly, keeping one hand on Dean's arm to steady him where he sat. "If you don't know, then you don't wanna."

"Then who is it?"

"Infected," Dean grated, wincing and smacking at Sam's hand, though he made no move to pull himself to his feet.

Risa's head whipped back to the window, then to the doorway, visibly torn. "It's not just me," she said, like it wasn't obvious, like she was admitting some sin. "I had another – "

"You can't," Sam said, simply, because she looked like she was set to run, and that ship had sailed. She wouldn't accomplish anything but alerting the infected to their whereabouts even quicker. It wasn't that he was necessarily unwilling to sacrifice _her,_ but he was unwilling to risk further harm to his already wounded brother if he had a chance to avoid it. "Dean," he pressed urgently, turning back to said wounded brother. "How close are they?"

Dean grimaced, lines deepening around his eyes as he tried to come up with the right answer. He shook his head until he seemed to completely throw off his equilibrium and began to list to the side.

Sam adjusted his hold, one hand on Dean's shoulder and the other gripping the back of his neck to steady him. If possible, his skin had grown even colder to the touch, like palming some tacky ice sculpture instead of a living person.

"I dunno, Sammy," Dean finally said softly, dejected, as though he was conceding defeat. His eyes dropped closed like he'd exhausted himself, at least for the moment.

Sam frowned, feeling fractionally responsible for the strain Dean had put on himself, the way he'd pushed the man for answers, and he moved immediately to rectify that. "S'okay, Dean." _You don't have to do everything, jerk._ He gently tipped his brother toward Risa and she caught him gingerly, propped him up against herself like she was afraid to actually touch him. "Watch him," he snapped. "And don't, you know, shoot him anymore."

Sam moved in an awkward crouch to the window and straightened enough to peek over the sill. A breeze lightly tossed his hair as he immediately spotted movement at the end of the yard, just past the fence in the tree line beyond the vehicles. They hadn't spotted the sun in weeks, months, years, but it was still there, and a soft gray glow filtered through the cloud cover and silhouetted the shapes approaching the house, shapes that were clearly people, but shuffling stiffly and awkwardly. Four, maybe five. Not his people, that was for sure.

 _Shit._

Dean had been right before, when he was lobbing every argument in his considerable arsenal in an effort to come along; the infected had never gotten this close to one of their groups before he'd been able to sound the alarm.

Sam's eyes darted nervously to his big brother, crumbled in a boneless way in the arms of the maybe-stranger who had shot him, to the jagged, oozing tear in the side of Dean's head. He _hadn't_ been able to sound the alarm, not with this degree of injury, and not in enough time for them to get the hell out of Dodge.

It was much too late for _whys_ and _what ifs_ , and Sam shifted his focus to getting his brother back on his feet. He dropped silently to the other side of Dean and put a hand at his elbow, rousing his attention. He smiled tightly, hoping it looked the least bit encouraging. "Can you stand?"

Dean glared, the resolve in his eyes somewhat dampened by the sheer volume of blood covering his head, face and neck. But if they were going to survive this, if they were going to walk out of this house the same way they walked in, then he didn't have much choice in the matter.

Sam nodded at Risa, and they gripped Dean under each arm and hauled him quickly to his feet. Risa, seemingly unsure about exactly how much of her help was wanted and for damn good reason, stepped away but Sam kept a steadying hand at the ready, fully expecting his brother to need the assist to remain upright. Seeing as he had just been _shot_ in the fucking _head._

But Dean was one stubborn son of a bitch. He swallowed a few times, white-faced and sweating as he visibly flirted once more with the need to vomit. He came out on top of this battle, a bit of color returning to his cheeks as the ghostly white pallor leached out of his complexion. He raised his eyes to Sam and nodded stiffly.

"Can you shoot?" There was an edge in Sam's words, and while he didn't intend the hostility to slip out he couldn't necessarily disagree with it. He didn't want Dean out there, and had told him that.

"Well enough," Dean rasped, the corner of his mouth curving upward.

Steering him closer to the wall and slapping a loaded weapon back into Dean's unsteady hand, Sam was anything but amused. This was more than target practice in the bunker, more than a big brother trying to downplay both his obvious physical and perceived internal weaknesses. "Dean."

Dean slid the magazine out of the 1911, rapped it against the grip to seat the bullets and winced as his wounded head disagreed with the harsh metallic _tap_. He didn't look at Sam as he said, "I guess we're about to find out."

As much as he appreciated his brother's honesty, the words weren't exactly encouraging. Sam rolled his eyes, left Dean standing mostly under his own steam against the wall and returned his attention to Risa. "You left a man downstairs?"

She nodded hesitantly in the affirmative. "We watched you come in."

Squatting, probably, Sam figured. Or scavenging, looking for supplies, but nothing of the importance or significance for which they came looking. She would've taken off with their weapons after she shot them dead, cleaned out their pockets like any good vulture, but hadn't given Sam reason to believe she had any inkling what this place used to be.

Dean was watching them from where he was propped in the corner, visibly struggling to follow the path of the conversation. Sam would have felt a lot more comfortable taking this inevitable confrontation on the offensive, but not with his brother having to put so much effort into holding up his own damn head.

He pushed forward with his line of quiet questioning, trusting Dean to alert them both as the infected drew nearer. "Is it just the two of you here?"

Risa nodded again, her dark eyes heavy with the knowledge – and with the experience – that if they weren't already in the house, and if her man wasn't already dead, he was probably something much worse. "There aren't a lot of us left." Based on the sadness edging her words, she may have already lost someone who meant something.

 _Who hasn't?_ "There isn't a lot of anyone left," Sam returned, not meaning to sound harsh, but not caring if he did. He crossed the room to the window and peered through the open spot in the wall, squinted as his eyes traveled the extent of the barren yard outside the house. The approaching infected he'd spotted before were nowhere to be seen. Neither was Colin, and that included a body. "Our man's gone."

Dean's head whipped over, his expression startled and concerned, because he'd had his differences with the guy but that didn't mean he wasn't a friend. Didn't mean Dean wanted to see him dead.

Risa frowned, noting the strangeness of Sam's phrasing. "Gone?"

"Yeah." Sam drew back from the window and made meaningful eye contact with Dean, who shook his head like he had water in his ears. It was likely he'd already been able to give as much warning as he would be able to. "Not dead. At least, I don't think." Sam turned back, squinted out at the dark yard and shook his head. "I can't…"

Risa swallowed and her complexion blanched. She looked suddenly terrified, an intense wash of fear that came only from some really bad experiences and last had her pulling the trigger of a gun aimed at his brother. "What is it, then? Collectors?"

"What's that?" Dean spoke up, his voice low and laced with pain.

Risa's eyes ticked toward him, and there was some degree of remorse mixed in with the fear coating her features. "It's our name for the ones that take people, the people that never come back." She looked back to Sam, seemingly full up of staring at Dean's blood-drenched face and neck, of studying her handiwork. "Why, what do you call them?"

Sam gave a slight, exasperated shake of his head, letting his gaze drift back out of the open window. He didn't have time for this, none of them did. "We don't call them anything. There's us and there's them. Infected is infected."

And Colin was gone, infected or dead, or he would have found them in the house by now. Dean was right; the guy had been kind of a dick the past few weeks, but no one deserved that. Same went for Jackson, a real good kid whom Sam could only assume had suffered a similar fate. And he knew full well it wouldn't matter if the head wound was what prevented Dean from sensing the infected before they managed to get so close, his brother would shoulder the guilt of two more lost. Would retreat back in on himself and privately, silently bear the weight of two more bodies.

If they weren't lucky, and they had been infected, then their lost friends might yet find the three of them hiding in the house.

"They'll bottleneck in the doorway," Dean said suddenly, like he was reading Sam's mind, and putting forth buckets of effort into every word. He pushed away from the wall and his left leg visibly buckled, but he bit his lip and locked the limb into place, standing straight without assistance. One of these days, maybe, Sam would stop finding himself surprised by what his big brother was capable of. "We can take them out, one at a time. Quick and clean."

Sam nodded. "And if they're our friends?"

" _Friend's kind of a strong word, don'tcha think?"_ a much younger Dean replied in Sam's head, with a smirk. The snarky, easy-going big brother Sam missed but could hardly remember anymore, because he hadn't existed in years.

An almighty splintering of wood _cracked_ up from the first floor, a sure sign that they were no longer alone in the house. Dean wasn't smirking, or cracking jokes. Not anymore. His face was thin and pale and hard, the expression given even more gravity by the gory blood still spilling slowly, but alarmingly enough, from his head wound. He raised his gun. "Then we'll be doing them a favor."

They retrieved the forfeited knives from the floor and scattered, taking up defensive posts around the room. Risa slid into place across from Sam like she'd done this before, tucked into the corner on the other side of the doorway.

"Gotta say, I'm not exactly in love with this plan, Dean," Sam said in a harsh whisper.

Dean raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement, and took aim at the doorway from across the room. Farther from the action, but out in the open.

With the infected, some things were still rooted deeply in their once-human brains. Some things they remembered, strange things you wouldn't expect, like driving a car. But at the same time, they were a lot like rabid dogs and it got worse the longer they'd been afflicted, until they finally burned out and fell down dead. They succumbed to something of a herd mentality, and would always take the quickest route to their intended victim. Not necessarily the easiest or the most obvious one.

They completely bypassed the open, unobstructed doorway as they attacked, breaking straight through a weak spot in the wall only a foot to Sam's right.

* * *

 _To be concluded in Part V..._


	5. Part V

**For What It's Worth**

 _Part V_

* * *

Sam spun quickly, firing right through the temple of the first body that emerged. Bloods arced and splattered as the infected man fell forward, hung up in the splintered section of the wall and the thick, black veins on his neck and cheek stood out starkly against his otherwise white skin.

They surged forward after that, breaking more of the wall supports and widening the gap in their determination to get to the three of them. Finding the way impeded, some of them finally spilled through the open door, each of them loosing that wordless guttural growl that set Sam's teeth on edge.

Four or five? His initial estimation wasn't even in the ballpark of accurate. They were looking at ten of these things, at least, and each of them was moving with a feral, single-minded focus to rip them apart. The only plus was that, so far, he didn't recognize any of the veiny faces hell-bent tearing him limb from limb.

"You see the difference yet?" Sam called over his shoulder to Risa, frustration driving his voice up in volume.

"Don't let them take me," she returned, steady but frightened. But whatever vulnerability she'd just allowed to slip past her considerable inner defenses was quickly stifled as she pursed her lips and took aim at the infected rushing them, dropping another one easily before they began to break through the wall in earnest.

"Don't worry," Dean assured her with a bloody, deadpan expression. "I owe you a headshot." He squeezed off a round and missed horribly wide, the bullet ineffectually striking the wall.

A hard, cold ball of dread formed in Sam's gut, because even with his head bleeding like it was, even with his vision compromised and his balance fucked, Sam really thought his brother could make that shot when push came to shove. And that wasn't his fault, because he'd been conditioned to.

The attacking infected were smart enough to recognize that miss of Dean's as a sign of weakness, of a vulnerability begging to be taken advantage of, and two of them split off from the rest of the group.

Dean managed to fire two more useless shots that damaged the structural integrity of the house more than they hurt his surging attackers. He went down much too quickly as they rushed and collided with his unsteady body, sending him thudding to the hardwood on his back with a shout.

Sam stepped forward and fired with a steady aim that was at a complete juxtaposition to the anxiety and adrenaline coursing through his veins as he watched Dean go down and stay there. When the pile went motionless, he waded through the deadweight arms and legs to thankfully find his brother in one bruised, rumpled piece, and dragged him upright.

There was no time to exchange reassurances or assign significance to any new injuries; not two seconds after he got Dean back on his feet, Risa cried out, tackled into the doorframe and drawing Sam's attention. She'd lost her gun in the attack but before he could decide to lend assistance, there was a flash of steel as she produced a blade, fought and hacked her way through her attacker. A bright spray of arterial blood decorated the floorboards as she slit his throat.

Sam didn't get the chance to be properly impressed, as one of them growled, grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket and threw him into the wall. He hit, hard, and now it was _his_ gun that was sent skittering out of play. He heard it clatter to the hardwood and immediately raised his arms to defend against an onslaught of blows that snapped his head left and right and left again. The face in front of him was snarling, nearly foaming. The infection had nearly run its course in this man, but this last burst of rabid, furious violence certainly didn't come across as death throes.

Sam's ears were ringing, and the arm pressed suddenly against his throat, forcing him against the wall was thick and sturdy as a tree branch. They were getting choosier, pickier about those that were killed and those that were turned. That much was obvious, or he'd have been one of the two already. But they weren't looking to do either with him. They were trying to incapacitate. To _collect._

Hot, fetid breath oozed over the exposed skin of his face and throat and Sam gagged at the sensation, pawed at the arm and tried to pull away, tried even harder to pull in a solid lungful of oxygen, and failed on both accounts. His head swam and he blinked hard, sending the black spots scattering and bringing tears to his eyes, and through the wetness gathering on his lashes he thought he saw his bloody brother standing behind the infected man that had him pinned against the wall _._ Thought Dean might have had a gun pointed right at one of them.

He'd already made it quite clear that he couldn't hit the broad side of a barn right now, but with Sam backed into a corner, push shoved, and Dean squeezed the trigger.

Any shot, slash or stab that would kill a human being would kill one of these things. It was distracted by the shoulder hit Sam could only hope was intentional and not a missed shot taken at some other, more vital body part. A second shot squarely to the forehead proved him right and sent the creature careening completely away to slam thickly, bodily against the wall to slide to a heap against the baseboards.

Dean shifted his attention and aimed in tandem with Risa, who'd had time to collect her fallen Glock, and they fired three shots each at the remaining infected, dropping them to the floor in a twisted heap of veiny, stiffened limbs and dark, pooling blood.

Sam pulled away from the wall and kicked the body of his assailant onto its back, sent a discrete, cursory glance across the lax, distorted features of the others as he stooped to retrieve his gun and comforted himself with the knowledge that it didn't look like either of their guys were in the room. He remembered what was left of the team that had been with Dean when he'd been taken, and his mind quickly superimposed the gruesome images over the faces of a smirking Colin, and a too-young Jackson. He shook his head roughly, sending the mental pictures scattering away.

"Nice shooting," Risa offered in a shaky voice, breaking the somber silence that had fallen over the room.

Sam stared at her with a mixed bag of feelings. She'd shot his brother, dammit, and it was a shot meant to kill him. There was a bullet left in his suddenly incredibly heavy-feeling Beretta carved with her name, but she'd had more than one opportunity to finish the job, or turn tail and run, and did neither.

"Didn't I tell you we had a connection?" Dean asked, throwing her a wide, goofy smile that resembled a Halloween mask, or the twisted grin of a madman, with blood splattered across and dripping from his face. Not all of it his at that point, but more than enough. The seams of his jacket sleeve were ripped over his right shoulder, and he winced as he shifted his weight to his left leg.

Risa, looking equally embattled, didn't answer, just turned wide eyes to Sam. Whatever "connection" she may have never had the chance to have with an otherwise apocalyptic war-hardened Dean, Sam was the one who held her life in his hands.

But as he was prone to do, Dean made the decision for him, as his eyes rolled up and Sam was forced to drop the gun and step in quickly to catch his brother around the shoulders, halting his descent to the floorboards as he started to go down.

Sam's tired body protested the additional burden with _creaks_ and _cracks_ in joints that had seen their fair share of battle, and he was mindful of Dean's possibly once more fucked-up leg as he attempted a controlled drop, ended up in an awkward seated position with most of his blood-drenched, deadweight big brother flopped across his lap.

A silence fell once more over the room, the chilly air dense with displaced dust, heavy with death, and tangy with the scent of fired guns and spilled blood. A scent Sam had grown nauseatingly accustomed to. "Damn," he said, breaking the quiet, voice thick with exhaustion and just a sprinkling of awe.

"What?" Roughed up and trembling from her own waning burst of adrenaline, Risa's voice was brimming with more than one emotion, but awe certainly wasn't anywhere in the picture.

"Nothing. It's just…" Sam shook his head and drew his bloody brother closer to his chest, pressing two fingers against the pulse thrumming beneath Dean's stubbled jaw and pretending for just one moment that they were safe, surrounded by friendly faces and anywhere but here, regardless of the tacky blood staining the cool, clammy skin beneath his fingertips. "He made the shot."

She did little more than completely ignore his observation, spinning stiffly in the center of the dark room. "Is that all of them?"

"Yeah, I think so."

Risa snorted, a weary, decidedly unamused sound. She scrunched her nose, swiped her shoulder against her cheek to rid her face of a smear of blood there. "Considering our circumstances, I'm gonna need a little better than _I think so._ "

"Yeah." Sam couldn't argue that point, and jostled his fallen brother as subtly as possible, trying to rouse him without it looking like that was what he's doing. If they hadn't yet given away the farm that Dean could sense the mere presence of the infected, Sam would have liked to not make it so blatantly obvious, no matter how desperate he might have been to put his own mind at ease and get them the hell out of there.

Dean's head rolled limply against Sam's shoulder but he wouldn't wake, mouth slack and closed eyes ringed with smoky, exhausted smudges against the seemingly bloodless backdrop of his pale, faintly freckled skin.

Sam had a gut instinct, and he'd been raised and trained to trust that, but he dug under the cuff of Dean's jacket for a second opinion, finding his brother's wrist cool, but thankfully not cold, and his own fingers remained warm where they were pressed against his skin. "I think we're in the clear," he said, without any clue how he was going to justify his reasoning if she asked.

But Risa already had other things on her mind, and it turned out that, no, they weren't in the clear just yet. Because she was stepping forward with a dark, heavy gaze, eyes trained on Dean and still gripping on her pistol like they weren't quite finished. Like Sam maybe shouldn't have been so hasty in allowing his own weapon to fall from his grasp, because she was frightened and desperate, wounded and unstable in ways that didn't come with visible marks or blinking neon signs.

Sam followed the line of her stare straight to the gaping furrow cut across his brother's head, and his fingers tightened on Dean's sleeve. "What the hell are you doing with that?"

She blinked hard, like he's startled her, and gestured with the barrel of her Glock. "He has an open wound."

"So?"

" _So_?" Risa raised her eyebrows. "So he's covered in blood, and that wound is a point of ingress for the infection." She shook her head. "And I didn't have eyes on him the whole time."

Well, I did," Sam said loudly, stubbornly, and not inviting further argument. "You're not shooting my brother."

Risa jerked her head back in surprise, then lowered her voice to a softer, almost sympathetic tone. Like she'd been there, like she'd stood on the other end of such a conversation. "I get that he's your brother, Sam. But if you love him, then you won't let him turn into one of those things."

Rejecting her sympathy, Sam clenched his jaw and sent a harsh exhale through his nostrils. She misunderstood him, seemed to think he was trying to prolong the inevitable instead of pleading his case that Dean wasn't infected, but there was only so far he was willing to go. Only so much information he could share. "You don't _get_ anything, lady, and you're not _shooting_ my brother." _Not again, anyway,_ he angrily and silently supplemented. "He's not infected."

Risa's eyes narrowed. "How could you possible know that?"

"I just do, okay?" Sam all but shouted, throwing his arm across Dean's chest. "Now put the damn gun away!"

"No." Risa shoos her head, her eyes bright and a little crazed as a rare shaft of sunlight hit them just right. "I'm sorry, but that's not good enough. I can't take that chance. I can't become…that."

 _She'll kill us both before she takes that chance,_ Sam realized, and he held up a hand. "Put the gun down, all right? He can't…" He worried his bottom lip. This wasn't exactly dinner table conversation, and Dean was going to kick his ass for this when he was feeling up to it. _Better than being dead,_ he had to figure, though he wasn't entirely sure how true that was these days. "He can't _be_ infected."

Risa's lip curled, and her finger inched toward the trigger. "What do you mean he _can't_ be?"

"He…it's complicated."

"Complicated?" Risa lowered the gun, thumbed the safety but didn't completely tuck the Glock away. "Like how he knew those things were here? That kind of complicated?"

Sam nodded, relieved and irate, all at the same time. "Exactly that kind of complicated."

He was used to people coming back from the dead but the last face he expected to see in the doorway was Jackson, as he slipped in a smear of blood across the hardwood in the hall and thudded into the doorframe, not unlike Dean had before. Mere moments earlier, though it felt like it had been days ago.

Risa whirled, brought the gun up and took aim, and she was edgy and she'd already proven that she had an itchy trigger finger but she somehow at the same time had her wits about her, and she scared the shit out of the kid but didn't squeeze off a shot. So that was progress.

"Whoa, whoa." Jackson raised his hands quickly, ducking his head a bit. He seemed rumpled, ragged and bruised, a fist-sized maroon splotch coming to color along his jawline. He sucked in a few deep breaths, and didn't speak again until he was satisfied that he wasn't about to eat a bullet, at least for the moment. "Sam, you making friends?"

"Yeah," Sam answered, with a pointed look at Risa. "I think so."

"Not until I check him over," Risa persisted with a tight jerk of her chin. Sam would swear he saw a blush creep into Jackson's cheeks before she added, "Open wounds, lemme see 'em."

"No worries there." Jackson dropped a sheepish, embarrassed smile. Sad, even. "They didn't touch me. Didn't even see me." He raised his eyebrows, like he was requesting permission to move, then waved a hand back toward the hallway. "I'm guessing he was with you? Got the drop on me. I missed the entire party." His face fell, the smile melting away entirely and his eyes taking on a remorseful, faraway look Sam had grown tired of seeing on the faces of his people, but had been an inevitability from the day the kid joined up with them.

It must have been one hell of a guy that she lost downstairs, because Risa accepted this explanation far easier than anything Sam had attempted to chuck at her. "Did you see him? After, I mean?"

Jackson nodded slowly, keeping his hands raised. "Yeah. I did."

That was enough for her. The Glock thumped roughly against her thigh as she dropped her aim and spun away from them. An obvious gesture of more than one kind of surrender.

The kid mirrored the motion, allowing his hands to drift slowly down to his sides. "We okay here, Sam?"

"Not even close." Sam sighed and shifted Dean's weight, propping his unmoving brother up against his chest. They were no safer than they ever were, and without additional distractions, concern for Dean was muscling its way to the forefront of his mind. "Help me get him to the car."

* * *

Sam remembered long drives in the Impala, atrociously, hellaciously long drives, with his brother chucking empty pop bottles into his lap when he dared to say he had to piss, and listening to Zeppelin IV for the third time since getting in the car. What he wouldn't have given to go back to those days, to be riding shotgun with Dean claiming the tape was stuck in the deck and the radio suckd here anyway, then cranking the volume and crooning along, too loud and horrendously off-key. Those days Sam had never appreciated at the time.

He had a long drive ahead of him now. Maybe one of the longest of his life.

Sam's eyes cut a frantic road ahead-side mirror-rearview circuit, and when he didn't trust – or maybe didn't want to believe – the shadow-y reflection in the mirror he twisted enough to peek over his shoulder to where his brother was crammed as horizontally as possible across the backseat of the Jeep with his head propped in Risa's lap. There were jokes to be made, bad ones, and a dozen of them. But all Sam could focus on were Dean's closed eyes and ashen complexion, the blood covering his face and still oozing from the stubborn and seemingly mile-wide gash in his temple.

Risa was futilely attempting to stop the flow by pressing the edges of the ragged wound together but her fingers, already slick with Dean's blood, kept slipping. "Sam," she said after only a few miles, his name sounding foreign in her voice. "I need something better to keep pressure on this."

Sam's grip on the wheel tightened, until his knuckles went white and his fingertips tingled. He jerked his head roughly, hating himself. "Then you'd better come up with something. Because I'm not stopping yet."

"Wha – _Sam._ "

"We could have a tail, Risa." Her name was no less a stranger on his lips.

"We don't."

"You don't know that," he returned, and her exasperated release of breath had Sam tipping his temple in concession that he was being something of a hypocrite. He tossed a look down at the gas gauge and swallowed. "We'll have to refuel in another hundred miles or so." A horribly off-the-cuff ballpark estimate, just using his voice to fill the hollow, uncomfortably silent space in the car that felt like a lack of Dean. "We'll figure something out then."

"Yeah, if he doesn't bleed out first," she muttered, and he caught sight of her trailing apologetic fingers through Dean's hair.

Something about her words, about her tone – the feisty one that Dean would have loved but made it sound like this predicament his brother was in was somehow HIS fault, it snapped a string inside Sam, pulled the cover off of the anger he'd done well to keep in check for more than a few years, discounting his manhandling of Dean the previous day.

"Risa?" Sam watched her face in the rearview, waited for her dark eyes to rise and meet his in the mirror. "If my brother doesn't make it back alive, then neither do you."

To her credit, she seemed to understand that she deserved every bit of the threat, ducking her head completely out of his eye line. Which, he guessed, was how she found the sack to ask, "How did he know?"

"What?"

"That they were there." Risa shifted in her seat, raised her eyes and pinned Sam in his with a stare so intense, it smoldered even through the curtain of her bangs. "How did he know?"

Sam rolled his shoulders uneasily but returned her steady gaze. He'd had the time to reestablish his line in the sand on the playing field of explanations. "He just did. And we're gonna leave it at that."

She sighed and rubbed the back of her neck, looking and sounding both irritated and bone-tired, and seemingly unable to decide which one should take precedent. So at least they had something in common. "Where are we going?"

Sam's eyes slid to the side mirror, confirming Jackson was sticking close behind them in the second Jeep. Kid's face was all kinds of colors back at the house and he was probably nursing some degree of concussion but they couldn't afford to leave one of the vehicles behind. They'd had to assume Colin was killed, but never did find a body. "Safest place on Earth," he answered stiffly. "Don't worry, you'll fit right in. Lots of 'shoot first' types."

Risa's eye twitched. "I _am_ sorry, Sam."

It still sounded odd, though not entirely lacking sincerity, and Sam wondered how many times he was going to have to hear her say it. Wondered if maybe she wasn't even really telling him anymore, if she was telling herself. Telling Dean, because it was easier when she knew he couldn't hear her.

"He said he knew me."

"Yeah," Sam said, grateful for the change in subject and aiming for something at a temperature cooler than homicidal hostility in his voice.

"How?"

Sam sighed. "I guess there's no good way to say this other than to just say it. About ten…nine?" He cocked his head. "Yeah, nine years ago, an angel named Zachariah zapped Dean five years into the future to see…" He adjusted his grip on the wheel, found his toe pushing that line in his ability to explain things, the one he wouldn't let himself cross. "Anyway. That's where he met you."

She was silent for a full five miles. "That was the _good_ way to say it?"

Despite himself, Sam smiled. "Yeah."

"An angel?" Risa asked skeptically, raising a splayed palm and moving it about as she processed Sam's words. "An _angel._ Zapped your brother into a future that happened four years ago."

"Yeah."

"Except…it didn't happen."

"No."

Because you _saved the world."_

"Yeah."

"Well." She shook her head, dropped her gaze back to her unconscious charge. "Bang up job, guys."

Sam didn't want to like her, but she was making it really damn hard to hate her. Then his eyes were drawn once more to the spill of crimson staining Dean's face and neck, and it steeled his resolve.

She noted the change in his expression, and Sam knew it had to be pretty obvious what was upsetting him. "Listen," she offered. "I'm not the kind of person who just goes around shooting people."

"Really? Because that's pretty much the reason I decided to let you come along." _And the reason I decided to let you live_ , but Sam bit down against those particular words, even as his eyes refused to look away from the bloody silhouette of his brother in the rearview mirror.

Risa stared out of the window, at the matte, ashen darkness that years ago would have been a sunny afternoon. Her fingers continued to rake absently through Dean's hair, and Sam kind of wished she would stop touching him. "Things are changing out here. It's getting harder to tell who's infected and who's just gone batshit."

She had a point, but Sam wasn't exactly looking to help this woman make excuses for nearly killing his big brother. Sam's own reflexes were the only reason she didn't. He cleared his throat. "So what were you?"

"Excuse me?"

"I just mean…well, you sure knew your way around those weapons." Sam's eye narrowed. "Were you a hunter?"

"What?" Risa shook her head. "No, I'm not…and I've never…I just, uh, I had to learn when I was young. And we're gonna leave it at that," she said, low and steady and parroting his earlier remark.

Sam lifted a surrendering hand from the steering wheel. "Fair enough."

He spared a moment to once more take stock of their situation. One man lost, another struggling to keep up. Dwindling gas, a possibly unpredictably hostile passenger and bleeding brother to round out his day. Hours and miles upon miles left to go, and he couldn't remember the last time he slept. But, as Sam reminded himself, his hand snaking up to pat the bulk of the spell tucked away inside his coat pocket, with the mission more or less successfully completed. The dense tree line at the edge of the road petered away to a few narrow, broken trunks, and a faint blush of dusky, setting sunlight lightened the interior of the vehicle and its passengers.

Sam's constantly roaming eyes completed another circuit, taking note this time not just of the unhealthy pallor of Dean's skin, but also of Risa's skinny face and chapped lips. He cleared his own dry throat and softened his tone. "There should be a bag somewhere back there, with some water. Might find some food, too, if you dig around enough."

She swallowed hard, and it looked like it hurts. She shook her hair from her eyes and pressed the heel of her hand against the tear in Dean's head. Dean didn't even twitch, hadn't since they'd loaded him into the car. "I'll be okay until we stop."

Sam chuckled lightly to himself, because if there was one damn thing to wring some dark humor from, it had to be this. Punishing herself for what she'd done to someone else; hell, she was going to fit right in.

"Sam?"

It might have just been the wishful thinking of a buzzy, overloaded mind both weary and wary of answering any more questions, but Sam thought maybe there was an air of finality to her tone, signifying this would be the last of her inquiries. At the same time, there was something hesitant as well, like she was well aware it might also prove the hardest for him to answer. "Yeah, Risa," he responded, trying not to sound impatient or annoyed, before realizing those were the things she should only be _hoping_ he was still feeling, instead of having had the time to work himself up to something much worse and unappealing for her.

"I…I thought he was infected." Said like that makes up for almost killing the guy. "Or…I don't know. He just looked…"

She didn't need to go on; Sam could fill in the blanks well enough for himself. Dean looked like shit. Had for a while, honestly, but that didn't make it okay. Maybe Sam had just grown used to it, memories of his brother's once larger-than-life personality struggling to fill the cracks and crevices the Hollow Men had left in their wake.

"He said something about getting better," Risa continued, absently, like she wasn't really speaking to Sam, but just speaking.

"Yeah." He cursed himself silently, that ability Dad had always taken advantage of and Dean had always ragged him for, to somehow give every damn person he met the impression that he was open to whatever conversation they may have wanted to have.

"Better from what?"

Sam steeled himself and constructed the wall in his mind, took his time preparing the mortar and placing each brick. She'd been in the trenches with them, and though he knew he didn't owe her a goddamn thing, he was finding himself too tired for any further lying or misdirection. It wasn't often that honesty seemed the easiest course. "You know those people that don't come back?" he began, when he was ready. "Well, Dean came back. I got him back." He hoped that would be the end of it, lest he be left to dwell on the memories of exactly how he'd found his brother.

He was wrong.

"What was it like?"

Sam's jaw clenched painfully, and forced himself to remember that he wasn't the only one to have someone taken. He was just the lucky one, the one who took back what had been stolen. "Where he was, what he went through…being infected definitely would have been worst case scenario."

Risa digested the implications of that with an inhale dragged sharply through clenched teeth, but boy, did she ever have a pair on her. "And best case scenario?"

"Dead," he answered simply.

"But he wasn't either."

She didn't know them, and that was how Sam had to figure it was so easy for her to pry. He shook his head, done with words for the time being.

"What was he?"

Sam found Dean in the mirror once more and took in the sight of this blood-streaked, pale and damaged man, lying prone at the mercy of the woman who'd aimed to kill him. A man who gave two hits for every one he took, which was more than his fair share. A man who wouldn't accept no as an answer, and who was stronger than he'd ever given himself credit for. Stronger than _Sam_ had ever given him credit for. For all the thoughts running through his mind, he could only catch one in his grasp. "My big brother."

A faint _ding_ alerted Sam to their diminishing fuel levels earlier than he'd estimated, and he dropped his gaze to the light on the dash. "We'll stop now."

* * *

Sam couldn't remember the last time he managed to catch more than two hours of rest, let alone a full night's sleep, and the fleeting glimpse of himself he spied in the window pane of a passing door was a shadowed, ghostly reflection more suited to one of the things they used to hunt than a living, breathing human being. He dragged a heavy hand through his admittedly gross-feeling hair, moved his fingers down to knead a stubborn knot in the back of his neck. His jaw cracked from the size and force of the yawn that ripped from his lips, but there was one more stop he had to make before he could finally crash.

He'd gotten Jackson tucked cozily into the infirmary and found Risa a room and some bedlinens, pointed her to the women's showers, and then he'd given everyone else the rest of the night off. No one was manning the large consoles, monitoring energy fluctuations or changes in weather patterns, and no one was mainlining caffeine while scouring texts in the library. The corridors and main areas of the bunker were deserted but for Sam, sparsely lit and weighted with an unfamiliar kind of quiet, the stillness a nearly tangible presence. The halls felt wider and noticeably empty, and if Sam didn't know any better he'd have thought he'd gone back in time five or so years, prowling these hallways in the dead of night or the too-early morning, unable to sleep and swallowed by a place built with the intention of housing dozens instead of just he and his brother, and the wayward prophet or angel.

Sam found Dean's room curiously, perhaps alarmingly, unoccupied. With a freshly stitched head wound – and one carved from a bullet, no less – he would have really appreciated the man staying tucked into bed for the night, or preferably for the next few days. But Sam didn't often seem to get what he wanted, and Dean had stopped making his decisions based on his little brother's needs a long time ago.

The blankets had been kicked to the foot of the bed and the long winding of gauze Paige had sent around Dean's head to stabilize and protect the stitches and bandaging lie in a discarded, slightly blood-spotted pile on the bedside table, and there was matching a swipe of blood across the pillowcase.

 _Damn it, Dean._

Sam bit the inside of his cheek and backtracked through the bunker with much hastier, more alert steps, poking his head into all of Dean's old haunts, the places he'd once been known to wander in a wounded, drugged stupor. The library was just as empty as it had been when he'd previously passed through, as was the kitchen. He was on his way to the shooting gallery, ready to sprint there if need be and smack a loaded gun from the moron's stubborn but unsteady hands, when a faint wash of light spilling in from the garage entrance at the end of the hall drew his gaze and attention.

Sam stopped on the threshold of the open door, eyes roaming the wide space and searching for his misplaced brother in all of the gaps between each vehicle both old and positively ancient. When he saw the Impala gleaming at the far end, her protective tarp shoved aside in a heap atop the concrete, it made so much sense it broke his heart a little.

He approached with deliberate, however cautious steps, wary of Dean's current state of mind given the events of the day, and came to a stop a few feet from the passenger side of the car. He crammed his hands into his pockets and stooped, peering through the open window. "Hey."

"Hey," Dean returned, thickly but seemingly unstartled by Sam's sudden presence. He was staring out of the windshield, even though there was nothing beyond the glass but a thick, pockmarked concrete wall, and despite his pale, nearly translucent complexion and the blood-spotted bandage on the side of his head, he looked comfortable, and somehow younger by _years_ , nestled behind the steering wheel of the Impala. He looked at home.

Sam's eyes lingered on the spots of blood but living in this wrecked world had only served to strengthen Dean's sense of self-preservation, and he spoke up before his little brother could reprimand him for being up and about when he should have been anything but. "Risa?"

Sam eyed the glass of whiskey in his brother's hand, opening the passenger side door with a _creak_ that had a way of lightening his heavy heart. "Got her set up in a room. She's still pretty freaked about you knowing her from the future. Or…past, I guess." He settled on the soft leather bench seat, leaving the door propped open and one leg outside the car, maintaining an important connection with the real world so he didn't disappear down the rabbit hole with Dean. "I think she's just clinging to it because it's the least freaky thing happening right now, you know? She said to tell you sorry. Again."

Dean squinted, swirled the liquid in his glass. "I'm fine."

Sam rotated a bit on the seat, putting the sharp angles of his shoulder blade in the junction of the seat and door, and frowned. "No, you're really not." He threw a glance around the interior of the car. "What are you doing?"

"S'a free bunker."

"It's also freezing out here. You should be in bed," Sam persisted.

Dean raised the glass to his lips. "M'not gonna be stuck in that bed again, Sammy."

The crack in Dean's voice might have just been indicative of the cocktail he was working with, pain and pills and alcohol and exhaustion, but it put a matching fissure in Sam's resolve. The well of angel healing had been tapped for the time being, and Dean was gonna have to ride the entirety of this one out on his own, at the mercy of his impressive pain threshold and a handful of whatever meds Paige had scrounged up from their dwindling storage. Sam hadn't taken the time to label or count the pills he'd watched Dean reluctantly swallow, but maybe he should have.

Thinking of the meds, Sam reached out to relieve Dean of his drink. "Okay, well, if you're gonna insist on being up, you definitely shouldn't be drinking whiskey." He dragged the glass from Dean's limp fingers, bringing the liquor into his own possession without a fight. Still fairly full, almost as though the weight of the drink in his hand, coupled with the presence of the car, had been comfort enough. "So Jackson's a little banged up, but you've got him beat for sure. He's gonna be okay."

Dean nodded, but he didn't look as though any of the weight had been lifted from his shoulders. If anything, he slouched even more in the seat. "Colin?"

Sam dropped his gaze to his hands. "We cut out of Upland pretty quick." _For obvious reasons._ "I'll send a couple of guys back to look for a body."

Dean bit down hard on his lower lip. "Yeah," he managed, and Sam knew the only reason he squeezed out that much was some deep-seeded, unnecessary feeling that he owed it to the man.

"He didn't die because you said you didn't like him, Dean," Sam said softly. He reached out hesitantly, gripped his brother by the shoulder for a moment, just a brief link and reassurance. "I mean, you're good, but you didn't make that happen."

"It doesn't matter." And it truly seemed as though it didn't. Sam hadn't ever heard Dean's voice so devoid of… _any_ feeling. "All of our friends, all the people we...they're all dead."

"Dean…" Sam began softly, but didn't have a damn clue where to go from there, and that was just fine, because it didn't seem as though his brother was remotely finished with his morbid train of thought.

"So are we legends, or just some kind of failed martyrs?" Dean shook his head, and his fingertips rubbed against themselves, like he was wishing for that glass of whiskey to be between them if he was going to have to think these thoughts and say these words. "Sometimes I wonder what the real difference is."

That was a hell of a heavy thought, considering the circumstances. Or maybe, considering the circumstances, it was one of an absolutely appropriate weight. Either way, Sam couldn't seem to find it within himself to properly deal with such a musing at the moment. He squinted, grasped desperately for a change in subject. "What are you doing in the Impala?"

Dean's throat worked around a swallow, and his fist curled against his thigh, but he didn't answer.

He didn't have to, because Sam didn't need the words. He could see the answer in those distant, heavy eyes. His brother was escaping. This world, this life, feelings of weakness and failure and responsibility. Escaping to a time and place where he still felt relatively safe and in control.

Sam contemplated the whiskey in his hands, weighed it against the persistent pound of exhaustion in his temples. "You, uh, you come out here a lot?"

"Yeah, sometimes, when..."

 _When it feels like everything's gotten away from me._

 _When I figured out what lies beneath rock bottom._

 _When I don't know what the hell anymore, Sammy, and I just can't do it._

Again, there was no requirement of words to know what Dean was thinking, or how he was feeling. Not in this particular moment, when he was as open a book as he'd ever been. Honesty was a fairly new, and not entirely unpleasant, color on Dean.

Dean hooked his left wrist over the wheel. His eyes were faraway, staring down a road only he could see, and a lazy grin slowly cut across his face. He turned towards Sam, draping his right arm over the edge of the seat and looking almost like he would if he were cruising those sunny, dusty backroads of a decade ago. "Hey, you, uh…" He looked over his shoulder at the empty backseat, and the grin widened. "You remember Piper?"

Sam cocked his head. "Who?"

Dean dragged his teeth against his bottom lip, shook his head and dropped his arm from the top of the seat, squaring his body back to the windshield. "Nothin'."

Head injuries tended to jar loose all kinds of thoughts and memories Dean wouldn't have usually put to words but without his usual stubborn self-restraint, he spat things out at random, like a playlist set to 'shuffle.' Sam had learned a long time not to put much stock or significance into what popped out of his brother's mouth in such a scenario.

"What would you do differently?" Dean asked suddenly, not really looking at Sam, or at anything in particular. The palm of his left hand ran distractedly against the worn leather of the steering wheel, taking a turn neither of them can really see coming up ahead. "If you could do it all again?"

This, though…this might have been something Sam should assign some degree of significance to. In the course of one day Dean had been forced to face the future they'd been able to prevent and the reality of a present they'd been powerless to halt. And, oh yeah, he'd also been shot in the _head_. This wasn't an entirely unexpected train of thought but all the same, regret wasn't something Sam liked his brother digging around in. He was likely to lose Dean there.

"I wouldn't know where to start," he answered honestly, after a weighty sigh.

"Yeah." Dean's dark, glassy eyes shifted around, searching out the location of his stolen drink, or just some other lifeline, perhaps feeling he'd exhausted them all at that point. "Yeah, me either."

* * *

 _The End_

* * *

 _Fellow fans of "Providence," when the idea for the end of this story hit me, I was so distracted by it that I literally splashed three hundred and thirty degree oil all over my arm. So you could say that "Providence" has scarred me for life._

 _Or, more accurately, that it's left a lasting mark._

 _Okay, Chick Flick Moment over. Thanks for stopping by, everyone! Don't forget to grab a gift bag on your way out!_


End file.
